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THE LIFE 

OF 

RICHARD CUMBERLAND, Esq, 



EMBRACING 

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION 

OF 

HIS VARIOUS TVRITTNGS. 
/ 

WITH AN 

OCCASIONAL LITERARY INQUIRY INTO THE AGE 
IN WHICH HE LIVED, 

And the * 

CONTEMPORARIES WITH WHOM HE FLOURISHED. 



BY WILLIAM MUDFORD 



" Man hath no need, no right, no interest to know of man more 
than I have enabled every one to know of me." 

Cumberland's Memoirs of Himself, 



LONDON: 

PRINTED BY CHARLES SQUIRi;, 

FurnivaVs-Inn Court, Holborn, 

FOR SHERWOOD, NEELY, AND JONES, 

PATERNOSTER-ROW ; AND J. ASPERNE, CORNH1LL. 
1812. 



DEDICATION 



TO 
FIELD-MARSHAL HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS 

THE DUKE OF KENT, 

Sfc. Sfc. Sfc. 



SIR, 

THE permission which your Royal 
Highness has granted me of inscribing to 
you the following Work, affords me an 
opportunity of publicly testifying those 
feelings which I have long cherished in 
private, and to the expression of which 
your Royal Highness has been no stranger. 
Perhaps, however, it is no less my duty than 
certainly it is my wish, that the world 
.should know them also ; for virtue is up- 
held, and the practice of benevolence dif- 
fused, by the contemplation of their exist- 
ence in others. 



DEDICATION. 

A dedication is commonly the meanest 
of all intellectual productions, and, in pro- 
portion to the elevation of its object, seems 
to be the determination of the writer to 
degrade, at once, his patron and himself. 
It too frequently happens that it is written 
to win from the great, by adulation, what 
can seldom be expected from truth ; or it 
labours with all the tumultuous phrases of 
exaggerated eulogy, to earn a pittance which 
rewards either falsehood or servility. 

I stand, however, in neither situation. 
I will not flatter, for your Royal Highness 
would receive it, as unwillingly, as I should 
offer it. I have sought, indeed, the present 
occasion, merely that I might tell how 
much and how frequently I have been 
befriended by your Royal Highness in 
the course of my life, and how truly I che- 
rish a just remembrance of your repeated 
kindness. 



DEDICATION. 

To do this is surely allowable without 
the imputation of meanness. It is a debt 
which every man owes to society, to dis- 
close the virtues of its members, and it is 
a debt which every man owes to his bene- 
factor, to make him the offering of his 
gratitude. 

Accept, as such an offering, this Dedi- 
cation, and permit me to subscribe my- 
self, with unfeigned sincerity, 

Sir, 
Your Royal Highnesses most obliged 
And obedient Servant, 

WILLIAM MUDFORD. 

November 22, 1811. 



PREFACE. 



W HEN the Memoirs of Cumberland wer£ 
published, I was forcibly impressed with 
their insufficiency in all that regarded the 
estimation of his literary character; and 
while I found in them all that could be 
wished about the man* I was conscious that 
whenever his death should happen, an am- 
ple and interesting opportunity would oc- 
cur for the union of this personal history, 
with a minute enquiry into the pretensions 
of the author. In what way, however, I 
conceived this scheme might be best exe- 
cuted, may be easily known from the fol- 
lowing pages, which I have endeavoured to 
make as interesting as I could. If I have 
failed, I will not seek to mitigate censure 
by an appeal to indulgence. 

b . 



X PREFACE. 

Whether any thing respecting Cumber- 
land, yet unknown, might have been ob- 
tained by application to his family, is un- 
certain. I forbore to try the experiment, 
because I wished to perform my under- 
taking with an unbiassed mind. Had I 
been indebted to them for any communi- 
cations, or for courtesies of any kind, I 
should only have increased my own embar- 
rassment, without, perhaps, increasing the 
advantage of the reader. No man can dis- 
regard the influence of those feelings which 
are generated by friendly intercourse, or by 
polite attentions ; and he might justly be 
charged with ingratitude and insincerity, 
who should obtain from the relatives of a 
person what information he needed, and 
then requite the obligation by giving them 
pain in his opinions. I resolved therefore 
to place myself in no such equivocal situa- 
tion, for I wished to think with freedom, 
and with freedom to speak my thoughts. 
Nor do I imagine that much could have 
been given had I asked, and had they, 
whom I asked, been willing to give; for 
Cumberland probably told all that need be, 
if not all that could be, known. 



PREFACE. XI 

In examining the writings of Cumberland 
I have sometimes done it with a minute- 
ness which may be thought unnecessary, 
and perhaps tedious. I did it, however, 
because I considered it as the fittest means 
of attaining my end, which was, to discover 
the full extent of his merits as an author. 
It enabled me, also, by adducing the grounds 
of my belief, to avoid the imputation of in- 
discriminate censure or praise. 

In the note, p. 62, I have spoken of Lord 
Chatham's Letters to Lord Camelford, and 
drawn a false inference, from believing that 
they were addressed to the late nobleman of 
that name, who fell in a duel. I am indebted 
to the vigilance of a friend for being able to 
notice the error in this place. 

I experienced some difficulty in ascertain- 
ing the dates of Cumberland's various pro- 
ductions, in which he has been inexcusably 
negligent. As often as I could I have sup- 
plied his deficiences ; but sometimes I found 
it impossible to do so without more loss of 
time than the acquisition would have cpm- 
pensated. 

62 



Mi PREFACE. 

The extracts which I have Occasion- 
ally made from his Memoirs, have been 
of such passages as either tended to illus- 
trate particular events of his life, and in 
which I conceived the employment of his 
own language might confer a character of 
authenticity ; of such as exhibited his ta- 
lents as a writer ; or, finally, where I ima- 
gined the amusement of the reader would 
be promoted by their introduction. I hope 
it will not be thought, however, that I have 
done this too copiously ; a splenetic reader, 
indeed, might tell me that I have not done 
it enough, by hinting that these extracts 
form the only valuable part of my book. I 
selected them sometimes with the expecta- 
tion that they would relieve the aridity of 
continued critical discussion, or the barren 
commemoration of familiar and unimpor- 
tant facts. 

For the freedom with which I have ex- 
pressed my opinions upon the works of liv- 
ing authors, I have no apology to offer, 
because I deem none necessary. I would 
have suppressed them, had I felt any ade- 
quate motive for it ; but I could not falsify 



PREFACE. Xlll 

them. I disclaim all influence of malignity 
or envy ; but I am not very anxious about 
the reception of my renunciation, because I 
know that the reverse will be more willingly 
believed by the majority of mankind. 06- 
trectatio et livor proms auribus accipiuntur. 
Tacit.— I have not sought occasions for 
censure ; but when they presented them- 
selves I did not shrink from the expression 
of it. Let those who differ from me disprove 
my positions by argument, and I shall be 
ready to listen, and happy to be convinced, 
but if they answer by the compendious rea- 
soning of scornful disregard, I shall know 
where the truth lies, and be sufficiently 
pleased with that proud silence which is 
more frequently the refuge of weakness than 
the conscious dignity of power disdaining to 
exert itself. It is often more prudent to 
despise an adversary than to oppose him, 
for while no evidence of inability is mani- 
fested, there will always be a credulous part 
of mankind who will disbelieve its existence. 

When I had just begun the composition 
of the present volume I was informed, by a 
friend, that I might expect a competitor in 



XIV PREFACE. 

Sir James Bland Burges, who was medi- 
tating a similar posthumous memorial. As 
I doubted, however, whether the public cu- 
riosity about a man like Cumberland, would 
justify two such undertakings, I deemed it 
adviseable to communicate with Sir James 
upon the rumour, and to acquaint him with 
my own intentions. 

This I did in a letter, where I also apolo- 
gised for obtruding myself upon his notice, 
personally a stranger to him as I was. As 
I am not fond enough of my own writings 
to make copies of my letters, I have conse- 
quently no one of this ; but if I remem- 
ber its purport rightly, it simply stated 
what I had heard respecting his being en- 
gaged upon a life of Cumberland, informed 
him of my own plans, expressed my 
apprehensions whether a double attempt 
would be likely to succeed, and made, I 
believe, some slight proposal of a coali- 
tion, supposing the report I had heard to 
be true. To this communication I received 
the following very polite reply from Sir 
James : 



PREFACE, XV 

€ * Beau Port, near Battle, Sussex, 
" §i Y> 16th September, 1811. 

u I was yesterday favoured with your 
letter of the 11th instant, respecting your 
intended publication of Mr. Cumberland's 
Life. 

" Nothing can be more unfounded than 
the report which has reached you of my 
having a similar intent. Mr. Cumber- 
land, indeed, by his will, left the manage- 
ment and publication of his MSS. to the care 
of Mr. Rogers, Mr. Sharpe, and myself; 
but his daughter, Mrs. Jansen, has declined 
our interference, and has advertized in her 
own name, an edition of certain plays, which 
Mr. Cumberland had, in the last year of his 
life, advertized for publication. I rather 
apprehend that Mr. Cumberland has not 
left any thing of much importance behind 
him ; but, as he latterly wrote many things 
for the booksellers, and for various periodi- 
cal publications, to which he did not affix 
his name, many of which have considerable 
merit, it might prove interesting to the pub- 
lic to notice them. In the most trifling of 
them, strong marks of his genius appear. I 



XVI PREFACE. 

am not aware that he ever wrote any thing 
in partnership, except the Exodiad, which 
we wrote together. After all, his great ex- 
cellence was chiefly shewn in conversation, 
in which his entertaining powers were un- 
equalled. Those who liv'd most with him 
could best appreciate this ; but this, like 
Garrick^s acting, vanished with him, and no 
adequate representation of it can be convey'd 
to posterity. My long intimacy with him, 
and the regard which I felt for him, make 
me rejoic'd to think, that so early a justice 
will be done to his memory, by a gentleman 
who appears to be so well qualified far the 
task which he has undertaken ; and J shall 
he ready to give you every information, on 
any point relating to him which may fall 
within my knowledge. 

f With every good wish for the success of 
your intended publication, 

" I am, Sir, 
u Your most obedient humble servant, 

" J. B. BURGES/ 5 

?J To William Mudford, Esq" 



PREFACE. XVII 

I was no less pleased with the gentlemanly 
^courtesy of this letter, than with the unex- 
pected opportunity, which it presented, of 
enriching my work. The grace of a volun- 
tary kindness has always appeared to me 
the most interesting quality in any kind- 
ness ; and when Sir James so politely of- 
fered to give me every information in his 
power, I must own that I anticipated a very 
pleasing accession of novelty and interest to 
my undertaking. I hastened, therefore, to 
acknowledge his letter, and besides speci- 
fying some particular information that I 
wished relatively to Cumberland's anony- 
mous writings for the booksellers, I solicited, 
in general, any other intelligence which he 
might wish to communicate or have it in his 
power to do. I expressed how much I was 
gratified by his unsolicited civility, and how- 
happy I should be to testify to the public 
the obligations I was to receive from him. 
Such, I believe, was the general purport of 
the letter ; but as I have no copy of it, and 
did not expect that its contents would ever 
become a question^ I can speak of it only 
from a very imperfect recollection. 



XY111 PREFACE. 

I now proceeded with my labour, and was 
hourly awaiting the proffered intelligence 
from Sir James. Day, however, passed after 
day, and no communication arrived. Still I 
was contented, for I could not imagine that 
a gentleman would thrust himself forward 
as a benefactor, and after all do nothing ; 
that he would make a vain parade of an 
unasked kindness, and let it evaporate in 
words ; that he would profess his delight at 
the justice to be done to his friend's me- 
mory, by one " so well qualified for the 
task," and yet withhold what might adorn 
or endear that memory. I could not sup- 
pose a deliberate intention to deceive, and I 
therefore candidly conjectured that the de- 
lay would be compensated by the value of 
the gift, and that he was only protracting 
the time that he might not make an offering 
unworthy of the occasion. 

I love to think well of mankind, and this 
illusion, therefore, consoled me for many 
weeks ; but when, at length, I found the 
volume approaching rapidly to a close, and 
remembered that I had not only received no 
answer of any description from Sir James, 



PREFACE. XIX 

to my second letter, but that he had also 
only vapoured and paid compliments, in- 
stead of performing a voluntary offer, the 
illusion vanished, and I discovered a dreary 
void of moral insincerity. 

No man is pleased to find himself the ob- 
ject of deception, when his own aims are 
fair and honourable ; and really, on this oc- 
casion, my surprise was at least as great as 
my indignation. I immediately considered 
what ought to be the conduct of a person 
who makes an unsolicited offer of his assist- 
ance, and finds that unsolicited offer accepted. 
No man, indeed, is bound to perform all that 
may be asked of him, but every man is bound 
to perform all that he promises ; and there 
is surely an additional obligation when that 
promise is the free offspring of his own judg- 
ment. Sir James thinks otherwise, how- 
ever ; but I hope I shall never exchange my 
code of ethics for his. Perhaps he might 
reply that he altered his opinion afterwards, 
and that he did not wish to incur any publie 
responsibility ; if so, I would have candidly- 
acknowledged the validity of his plea ; but 
why did he not rescue himself from a disho- 



%K PREFACE. 

nourable suspicion, by telling me so ? I was 
sufficiently confident in my own powers not 
to sink into despair at the anticipation of 
losing the assistance of Sir James Bland 
Surges . 

When I conceive that any person has con- 
ducted himself towards me with incivility, I 
cannot suffer him to enjoy the triumph of do- 
ing it with impunity, but take an immediate 
opportunity of expressing, with decision,what 
are my sensations ; and, accordingly, when I 
thought, beyond the ptfwer of self-delusion, 
that Sir James had done so, I told him my 
opinion in the following letter, of which 
I kept a copy, anticipating its present use : 

?. c Sir, November 11, 1811. 

" I had the pleasure of answering your 
obliging letter dated September 16th, a few 
days after the. receipt of it, and, availing 
myself of the offer which it contained, re- 
quested from you some information respect- 
ing those things which Cumberland had 
written, anonymously, for the booksellers, 
and any other topic which you might deem 
interesting to the public. 



PREFACE. XXI 

u When I ventured to make this request, 
I own I had some pleasing anticipations 
of success, and imagined I should be able 
to enrich my work with some curious facts. 
So long a time has elapsed, however, with- 
out receiving any communications from you> 
that I now consider my hopes as having 
been vainly formed; and I have brought 
the volume nearly to a conclusion without 
any of those advantages to it which I was 
led to expect from your promises. 

" I will not inquire from what motive 
this change in your intentions has arisen ; 
but, as I am conscious that I did not obtrude 
beyond what your politeness amply justi- 
fied in me, I must freely confess that I feel 
no pleasure in reflecting upon your silence. 
As, also, in the expectation of what you 
promised, I more than hinted to my friends 
the obligations I was to receive from you, 
I am afraid it will be necessary for me to 
advert to the failure in my preface, though I 
Jiope to do it without acrimony or coarseness 
" I remain, Sir, 

" Your obedient servant, 

" W. MUDF0RD. V 

" To Sir James Bland Burgas'* 



XXil , PREFACE. 

To this letter I received an answer ; a very 
brief one ; just eight lines ; in which, how- 
ever, Sir James, with much condescension, 
permits me to publish the correspondence 
that had taken place between us, " provided 
I published this letter with the rest." I was 
fully sensible of the value of the permission, 
and if I did not avail myself of it, it was only 
because I am more accustomed to act from 
my own judgment than from the dictates of 
others. I hope this apology will satisfy Sir 
James, for my omission of his laconic epistle, 
without wounding his self-importance. Its 
contents, indeed, do not deserve publicity ; 
for the only agreeable sentence in it is where 
he tells me that he should have held my 
letter " undeserving of an answer," if I had 
not threatened " to make free" with him in 
my preface ; and so he wrote me one in 
defiance. This is as it should be in a preux 
et hardi Chevalier ; and in the epic poet, of 
Richard Cceur de Lion. 

I have certainly made free with him, as 
he terms it, and if my freedom has the effect 
of rectifying his notions upon promissory 
obligations, I shall not repine at the trouble. 



PREFACE, XX111 

There is an admirable disquisition in Paley's 
Moral Philosophy, (B. III. Part I. chap, v.) 
upon promises, the attentive perusal of which 
I would earnestly recommend to Sir James ; 
not so much with regard to the transaction 
between us, for in that it appears to me that 
he has made himself merely ridiculous, in 
having vainly decorated himself with the 
title of a benefactor, without the ability or 
intention, I know not which, to support the 
character ; but in reference to the general 
concerns of life, for, if he adopts the same 
laxity of performance in all his promises, he 
may find, perhaps, more serious consequences 
result from it, than such a good-humoured 
retaliation as I have employed. 



W. MUDFORD 

November 20, 1811. 



THE LIFE 



OP 



RICHARD CUMBERLAND, Esq, 



CHAP. L 



Cumberland* s descent, a literary one. — His great 
grandfather, the Bishop of Peterborough, author 
of the work entitled De Legibus Naturae. — 
Anecdotes of him. — His primeval simplicity of 
character. — His works.- — Dr. Bentley, the ma- 
ternal grandfather of Cumberland. His do- 
mestic character not deducihle from his writings. 
Anecdotes of him. — Curious coincidence between 
a passage in one of his sermons, and some lines 
in Popes Essay on Man. 

I^UMBERLAND possessed one claim to the 
notice of his contemporaries and of posterity which 
is denied to many. He was derived from a literary 
stock, and some hereditary respect was attached 
to the descendant of Bentley and of Bishop Cum- 
berland. Nor did this patrimonial honour languish 
in his hands ; he improved the possession which 

B 



2 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

his ancestors had bequeathed to him, and trans- 
mitted it to his own posterity with increased 
value and renown. He was. proud indeed of the 
literary honours of his family ; but it was the 
pride of a man who wishes to prove himself worthy 
of th^m by his zealous emulation ; not of one who 
indolently reposes beneath the laurels which a 
preceding generation has earned, and which have 
devolved to him as the successor. 

Bishop Cumberland was the paternal great 
grandfather of our author. He was a man of such 
conscientious feelings, such primeval integrity of 
manners, and with such acquirements as a scholar, 
that whatever renown his descendant might ac- 
quire, it would still be capable of addition, from 
his consanguinity with a man so eminently en- 
dowed. He was the son of a citizen of London, 
and received his education first at St. Paul's 
school, and afterwards at Cambridge, where he 
took a degree of B. A. in 1653 (being then in his 
twenty-first year) and of M. A. in 1656. 

His first intention was to study physic, and he 
made some progress in those enquiries which 
would have fitted him to practise with some skill, 
though perhaps with less eminence than acci- 
dental causes might have conferred upon a can- 
didate less worthy of success. It has often been 
observed that a young physician is generally the 
plaything of fortune or of fashion: he either toils 
through life to acquire the reward he deserves; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 3 

or a lucky concurrence of circumstances gives him 
at once, the meed without, perhaps, the merit that 
should earn it. In the country, a physician may 
secure a respectable practice, because he acquires 
it commonly without much competition : but in 
the metropolis, he is confounded with a throng of 
aspirers, with those who do, and with those who 
do not, deserve the success they aim at ; and the 
finest talents, the most consummate skill, are 
doomed to obscurity for want of one fortuitous 
occasion to display themselves; while adventurers 
of humbler capacity start into notice and pursue 
a resplendent track of fame and fortune, the chil- 
dren and votaries of fashion and of prejudice. They 
divide, among themselves, the patronage of the 
town, and leave to their less successful brethren 
the fees of those whose confidence in their skill 
is, perhaps, less than their apprehension of heavy 
charges from their much employed superiors. I 
have heard a young physician, possessing talents 
formed to succeed, if talents alone could suc- 
ceed, lament with much bitterness this unequal 
distribution of reward and favour. 

From a profession so little calculated to engage 
the fancy of an aspiring mind, but pre-eminently 
adapted to satisfy the longings of a good one, Cum- 
berland soon turned aside, and directed his views 
towards the church ; a patroness equally capricious, 
perhaps, in the disposition of her favours. He 
diligently applied himself to the requisite studies, 

B 2 



4< LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and soon obtained a living, to the sequestered 
privacy of which he retired, attentive to his duties, 
and without a wish to change. The unaffected 
piety of his manners, and the zealous discharge of 
his office made him loved and respected : while 
his talents and erudition acquired him the applause 
and esteem of those who were best able to ap- 
preciate their extent and importance. 

During this unambitious retreat from the world 
and its cares, at Stamford, he published his work 
entitled* De Legibus Nature Disquisitio Philo- 
sophica, Sfc. ; which received the testimony of the 
learned in its favour, while the author lived, and 
was recommended by Johnson, in his preface to 
Dodsiey's Preceptor, as one of those books 
which " teach the obligations of morality without 
forgetting the sanctions of Christianity," and by 
which " religion appears to be the voice of reason, 
and morality the will of God." The author 
then takes his station with Grotius, Puffendorf, 
and Addison, as a fellow labourer in a cause so 
noble. 

When the Revolution took place, and it was 
thought necessary to secure the protestant esta- 
blishment, by the induction of such men into the 
vacant sees, as were known to revere the institution 
they were paid to support, Cumberland was not 
forgotten. The blameless purity of his life, the 
labours of his pen, and the orthodox tenets which 
he not only possessed but acted upon, distin- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5 

guished him as peculiarly qualified to form one 
of that band which was now to rally round the 
church, and secure her from the open or secret 
attacks of her enemies. He was accordingly 
nominated Bishop of Peterborough in 1691, in the 
room of Dr. Thomas White, who refused to sub- 
scribe to the new oath. 

This preferment, however, he neither sought, 
nor accepted with avidity when offered. He had 
learned to moderate his desires, and to find, in the 
rewards of his living at Stamford, an ample pro- 
vision for every want that his heart could feel. 
He had now passed through those years of life 
when wishes are most likely to be formed, and 
their gratification most vehemently sought. He 
was now on the verge of his grand climacteric, and 
shrunk from, rather than coveted, those episcopal 
duties, which would irresistibly call upon him for 
performance, if he accepted the station to which 
they were annexed. 

The first intelligence of his promotion to the see 
of Peterborough, was conveyed to him through a 
paragraph in the public papers ; and when he 
heard of it by the ordinary channel of com- 
munication, he hesitated to accept the honour : 
either from an inherent timidity of character, from 
a real moderation of happiness, or from the sug- 
gestions of a scrupulous mind, that he was now too 
old to undertake its duties. The persuasions of 
his friends, however, subdued his disinclination 



6 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

from whatever cause it arose, and he accepted the 
dignity of which the government had considered 
him worthy. 

The see of Peterborough was but moderately 
endowed ; yet no solicitations could, after- 
wards, induce him to permit a translation to a 
wealthier one. He never suffered his attention 
to be withdrawn from the obligations which it 
imposed upon him, but sedulously devoted him- 
self to their discharge, without permitting the 
sophistry of self-delusion to persuade him that the 
smallest might be dispensed with. This rigorous 
enforcement of his own duties he practised to the 
last month of his life ; and when his friends en- 
deavoured to dissuade him from labour, which 
they deemed so far beyond his strength to sustain, 
his constant reply was, " I will do my duty as 
long as I can/' Nor was this a new principle that 
he had adopted with his elevation to the prelacy: 
for when he was a young man, he habituated him- 
self to the same inflexible mode of life ; and if he 
was told, (as sometimes his friends did, from an 
allowable apprehension of the consequences of 
such scrupulous exactness) that he would injure 
his health, he usually answered, " a man had 
better wear out than rust out." 

From an attention thus assiduous, however, to 
his ecclesiastical duties, he found leisure to pro- 
secute his literary researches, and spent many 
years of his life in examining Sanchoniatho's 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 7 

Phenician History, to which undertaking he was 
impelled by reasons laudable in themselves and 
likely to produce benefit to society. They are 
detailed by Mr. Paj^ne, (who married his daughter 
and published his posthumous works, among which 
was the one now mentioned,) and may be here 
briefly adverted to. 

The errors of popery had been making rapid 
strides during the short reign of a popish king. 
Protected by the royal countenance it had assumed 
an open and undisguised shape, and, from its very 
nature, threatened the overthrow of the established 
religion. Of that religion, however, Cumberland 
was a zealous and a sincere supporter ; and he 
could not contemplate, without concern, the grow- 
ing danger that now menaced its prosperity. 
Revolving in his mind the plan most likely to 
secure its future stability, he conceived that the 
enlightened part of its opponents might be most 
effectually converted from their heretical opinions, 
by a precise exposition of the fallacies upon which 
they rested, and an historical detail of their origin 
and progress among mankind. Idolatry was the 
capital error of the Romish church, and to exhibit 
how it became first established, under what pre- 
tences, and supported by what authority, would be, 
in his estimations labour not un worthy a protestant 
divine, and not unlikely to destroy its ascendancy 
in the minds of the enquiring and rational adherents 
to the catholic faith. 



S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Of idolatry, however, the earliest account was 
to be found in Sanchoniatho's fragment, and this 
he studied with deep attention, labouring to ex- 
tract from it those evidences of the commencement 
of idolatrous worship which he wanted for his pur- 
pose. In this object he considered himself to have 
succeeded ; but his labour was rendered ineffectual 
by the timidity of his bookseller, who feared to 
publish any thing against popery, at that critical 
period when it was a question which the most 
penetrating observer of human affairs could not 
decide, whether the see of Rome or the church of 
England would triumph. But this repulse dis- 
couraged the Bishop so much that, though he did 
not abandon the prosecution of his design, he re- 
linquished all intention of making his labours 
public. He went on with his investigations be- 
cause he believed them to lead to important results: 
but he withheld them from the world, because he 
shrunk from that controversy which the promul- 
gation of his opinions would be so likely to 
generate. If it be asked why a man, so con- 
scientiously attentive to the performance of what- 
ever he considered as his duty, should have 
forborne, in this instance, to perform it from any 
apprehension of the consequences, the answer 
must be found in that apparent inconsistency 
which is discoverable in every character, but which 
would often cease to be such if we could exactly 
appreciate the motives of the actor. His labours, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 9 

however, were not lost to posterity, for his son-in- 
law published them after his death; but as they 
were abstrusely learned upon topics interesting- 
only to a few, their success was necessarily 
limited. 

Bishop Cumberland lived to an advanced age, 
and his death was gentle. He was found in his 
chair, in the attitude of one asleep, with a book 
in his hand, which he had been reading, the vital 
principle extinct, and the immortal one gone whi- 
ther the mind of man cannot follow. He was in 
the 86th year of his age. His character is thus 
given by his great grandson : 

" To such of his friends as pressed him to ex- 
change his see for a better, he was accustomed to 
reply, that Peterborough was his first espoused, 
and should be his only one ; and, in fact, accord- 
ing to his principles, no church revenue could 
enrich him ; for I have heard my father say, that, 
at the end of every year, whatever overplus he 
found upon a minute inspection of his accounts 
was by him distributed to the poor, reserving only 
one small deposit of 22/. in cash, found at his 
death in his bureau, with directions to employ 
it for the discharge of his funeral expences ; a sum, s 
in his modest calculation, fully sufficient to com- 
mit his body to the earth. 

" Such was the humility of this truly christian 
prelate, and such his disinterested sentiments as 
to the appropriation of his episcopal revenue. The 



10 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

wealthiest see could not have tempted him to ac- 
cumulate, the poorest sufficed for his expences, 
and of those he had to spare for the poor. Yet he 
was hospitable in his plain and primitive style of 
living, and had a table ever open to his clergy and 
his friends ; he had a sweetness and placidity of 
temper that nothing ever ruffled or disturbed. I 
know it cannot be the lot of human creature to 
attain perfection, yet so wonderfully near did this 
good man approach to consummate rectitude, that 
unless benevolence may be carried to excess, no 
other failing was ever known to have been dis- 
covered in his character. His chaplain, Arch- 
deacon Payne, who married one of his daughters 
and whom I am old enough to remember, makes 
this observation in the short sketch of the bishop's 
life, which he has prefixed to his edition of TheSan- 
choniatho. This, and his other works, are in the 
hands of the iearned, and cannot need any effort 
on my part to elucidate what they so clearly dis- 
play, the vast erudition and patient investigation 
of their author. 

" He possessed his faculties to the last, verifying 
the only claim he was ever heard to make as to 
mental endowments ; for whilst he acknowledged 
himself to be gifted by nature with good wearing 
parts, he made no pretensions to quick and bril- 
liant talents, and in that respect he seems to have 
estimated himself very truly, as we rarely find such 
meek and modest qualities as he possessed in men 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 11 

of warmer imaginations, and a brighter glow of 
genius with less solidity of understanding, and, of 
course, more liable to the influences of their pas- 



sions." 



Of Bentley, the still more illustrious ancestor 
of Cumberland, it is sufficient to mention the 
name, for to no man, however moderate his pre- 
tensions to literature, can it be unknown. We all 
remember the vastness of his erudition, the coarse- 
ness of his arrogance, and the extent of his con- 
troversial ability. Every reader of Pope recollects 
the line in which his skill in verbal criticism is 
consigned to contempt, and the passage in the 
Dunciad, where he is ridiculed with more aspe- 
rity than truth ; and every reader must likewise 
remember the man whose sagacity as a critic, and 
whose orthodox ardour as a divine, entitle him to 
the best remembrance of his country. I do not 
mean to vindicate the polemical harshness of Bent- 
ley, nor his absurd and preposterous emendations 
of Milton ; but I reverence the man who made the 
sublimest discoveries in science subservient to the 
eternal truths of religion, by applying the deduc- 
tions of Newton to the establishment of the funda- 
mental principles of our belief; and I admire that 
perspicacity of mind which has restored to their 
native purity some of the finest passages in the 
heathen writers. These claims to applause must 
be allowed by those who may be most disposed 



12 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

to censure his fierceness, or to ridicule his mis- 
takes. 

Cumberland might justly be proud of his de- 
scent from such a man, and the literary world is 
indebted to him for some particulars respecting 
him, which, if true, and there seems no reason to 
question their veracity, shew his domestic charac- 
ter in a light considerably more amiable than that 
in which it has hitherto been contemplated. 
Though there is certainly no necessary connexion 
between the habits of a man's private life, and 
those which he may display on public occasions, 
yet we are so naturally disposed to associate in 
our ideas these characters, that I question whe- 
ther it has ever been possible to entertain two 
completely distinct notions of an individual, even 
upon the closest inspection of his life, public and 
private. A political tyrant may be an innoxious 
companion ; and a literary despot may possess the 
gentlest of social virtues, but who can completely 
separate the tyrant from the companion, or the 
despot from the friend r They will both be ap- 
proached with cautious timidity, which no exer- 
cise of benevolence on their part can entirely dissi- 
pate, because there will still be the consciousness 
of what they are capable ; as we might be tempted 
to fondle a tame tyger, yet fearful in our caresses, 
because knowing the hidden disposition of the ca- 
pricious animal. Such, indeed, must always be 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND*. 13 

the unenviable fate of men who have made them- 
selves terrible in . the exercise of their faculties or 
of their power ; mankind will receive and transmit 
the stronger features of their character, while the 
softer and more engaging ones, tinted by the reflec- 
tion from the more powerful, will be forgotten, or 
only partially remembered and believed. 

Cumberland has endeavoured, and successfully, to 
remove some of the prejudices which are still en- 
tertained by posterity as to the social qualities of 
Bentley. He considers him as a man much mis- 
represented, and strives to impress kinder notions 
of him upon the reader's mind, by the detail of 
some familiar anecdotes, which certainly justify 
the belief that he has been aspersed. Pope has 
represented him, in the following couplet, as ob- 
sequiously attended by Walker ; 

His hat, which never veil'd to human pride, 
Walker, with rev'rence, took and laid aside. 

And in a subsequent part, Bentley is made to ex- 
claim, 

" Walker, our hat." 

Walker was vice-master of Trinity-college, and 
the intimate friend of Bentley. The hat, says 
Cumberland, " was of formidable dimensions;" 
but he denies that it ever strayed from the peg of 
his arm chair, and intimates that if it had, it is 
likely he himself would have been dispatched for 



14 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

it. This office, therefore, it may be presumed, the 
poet invented for the object of his satire ; but it 
does not seem to be disputed that the vice master 
" took it with reverence/' and we must therefore 
suppose that, instead of " laying it aside," he 
hung it on the accustomed peg. And thus this im- 
portant fact may be considered as satisfactorily as- 
certained by the joint sagacity of Mr. Cumberland 
and myself. 

Before I commence the immediate object of this 
volume, I will endeavour to add something to its 
interest, by exhibiting to the reader some of those 
qualities of Bentley's character, which shew him 
to have been less rigid and repulsive in domestic 
life than is commonly supposed. Such facts are 
always gratifying, both as they relate to a justly 
distinguished man, and as they serve to rectify our 
ideas, by removing unpleasing errors, and substi- 
tuting, in their stead, better notions of human 
nature, and feelings more agreeable to a good 
mind. They are extracted in the words of Cum- 
berland himself: 

" I had a sister somewhat elder than myself. 
Had there been any of that sternness in my grand- 
father, which is so falsely imputed to him, it may 
well be supposed we should have been awed into 
silence in his presence, to which we were admitted 
every day. Nothing can be further from the 
truth ; he was the unwearied patron and promoter 
of all our childish sports and sallies ; at all times 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 15 

ready to detach himself from any topic of conver- 
sation to take an interest and bear his part in our 
amusements. The eager curiosity natural to our 
age, and the questions it gave birth to, so teazing 
to many parents, he, on the contrary, attended to 
and encouraged, as the claims of infant reason 
never to be evaded or abused ; strongly recom- 
mending, that to all such enquiries answer should 
be given according to the strictest truth, and infor- 
mation dealt to us in the clearest terms, as a sa- 
cred duty never to be departed from. I have 
broken in upon him many a time in his hours of 
study, when he would put his book aside, ring his 
hand bell for his servant, and be led to his shelves 
to take down a picture-book for my amusement. 
I do not say that his good nature always gained 
its object, as the pictures which his books gene- 
rally supplied me with were anatomical drawings 
of dissected bodies, very little calculated to com- 
municate delight; but he had nothing better to 
produce ; and surely such an effort on his part, 
however unsuccessful, was no feature of a cynic : 
a cynic should be made of sterner stuff. 1 have 
had from him, at times, whilst standing at his 
elbow, a complete and entertaining narrative of his 
school-boy days, with the characters of his dif- 
ferent masters very humorously displayed, and the 
punishments described, which they at times would 
wrongfully inflict upon him for seeming to be idle 
and regardless of his task, ; When the dunces/ 



16 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND; 

he would say, c could not discover that I was 
pondering it in my mind, and fixing it more firmly 
in my memory, than if I had been bawling it out 
amongst the rest of my school-fellows.' 

" Once, and only once, I recollect his giving 
me a gentle rebuke for making a most outrageous 
noise in the room over his library, and disturbing 
him in his studies ; I had no apprehension of anger 
from him,' and confidently answered, that I could 
not help it, as I had been at battledore and shuttle- 
cock with Master Gooch, the Bishop of Ely's son. 
4 And I have been at this sport with his father/ 
he replied ; c but thine has been the more amusing 
game ; so there's no harm done/ 

" These are puerile anecdotes, but my history 
itself is only in its nonage ; and even these will 
serve in some degree to establish what I affirmed, 
and present his character in those mild and unim- 
posing lights, which may prevail with those who 
know him only as a critic and controversialist — 

As slashing Bentley with his desperate hook, 

to reform and soften their opinions of him. 

" He recommended it as a very essential duty 
in parents to be particularly attentive to the first 
dawnings of reason in their children ; and his own 
practice was the best illustration of his doctrine ; 
for he was the most patient hearer and most favor- 
able interpreter of first attempts at argument and 
meaning: that I ever knew. When I was rallied 



£IFE OF CUMBERLAND. 17 

by my aaother, for roundly asserting that I never 
slept , I remember full well his calling on me to ac- 
count for it ; and when I explained it by saying I 
never knew myself to be asleep, and therefore sup- 
posed I never slept at all, he gave me credit for my 
defence, and said to my mother, ' Leave your boy 
in possession of his opinion ; he has as clear a 
conception of sleep, and at least as comfortable an 
one, as the philosophers who puzzle their brains 
about it, and do not rest so well/ 

" Though Bishop Lowth, in the flippancy of 
controversy, called the author of The Philoleuthe- 
rus Lipsiensis and detector of Phalaris aut Capri- 
mulgus autfossor, his genius has produced those 
living witnesses, that must for ever put that charge 
to shame and silence. — Against such idle ill-consi- 
dered words, now dead as the language thev were 
conveyed in, the appeal is near at hand ; it lies no 
further off than to his works, and they are upon 
every reading-man's shelves ; but those, who 
would have looked into his heart, should have step- 
ped into his house, and seen him in his private and 
domestic hours ; therefore it is that I adduce these 
littleanecdotes and trifling incidents,which describe 
the man, but leave the author to defend himself. 

c His ordinary style of conversation was natu- 
rally lofty, and his frequent use of thou and thee, 
with his familiars, carried with it a kind of dicta- 
torial tone, that savoured more of the closet than 
the court ; this is readily admitted, and this on 

C 



18 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

first approaches might mislead a stranger; but the 
native candour and inherent tenderness of his 
heart could not long be veiled from observation, 
for his feelings and affections were at once too im- 
pulsive to be long repressed, and he too careless of 
concealment to attempt at qualifying them. Such 
was his sensibility towards human sufferings, that 
it became a duty with his family to divert the 
conversation from all topics of that sort ; and if he 
touched upon them himself he was betrayed into 
agitations, which if the reader ascribes to paralytic 
weakness, he will very greatly mistake a man, who 
to the last hour of his life possessed his faculties 
firm and in their fullest vigour ; I therefore bar all 
such misinterpretations as may attempt to set the 
mark of infirmity upon those emotions, which had 
no other source and origin but in the natural and 
pure benevolence of his heart. 

" He was communicative to all without distinc- 
tion, that sought information, or resorted to him 
for assistance ; fond of his college almost to enthu- 
siasm, and ever zealous for the honour of the pur- 
ple gown of Trinity. When he held examinations 
for fellowships, and the modest candidate exhi- 
bited marks of agitation and alarm, he never failed 
to interpret candidly of such symptoms; and on 
those occasions he was never known to press the 
hesitating and embarrassed examinant, but often- 
times on the contrary would take all the pains of 
expounding on himself, and credit the exonerated 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 19 

candidate for answers and interpretations of his own 
suggesting. If this was not rigid justice, it was, 
at least in my conception of it, something better 
and more amiable ; and how liable he was to devi- 
ate from the strict line of justice, by his partiality 
to the side of mercy, appears from the anecdote of 
the thief, who robbed him of his plate, and was 
seized and brought before him with the very arti- 
cles upon him ; the natural process in this man's 
case pointed out the road to prison ; my grandfa- 
ther's process was more summary, but not quite 
so legal. While Commissary Greaves, who was 
then present, and of counsel for the college ex 
officio, was expatiating on the crime, and prescrib- 
ing the measures obviously to be taken with the 
offender, Doctor Bentley interposed, saying, ' Why 
tell the man he is a thief? he knows that well 
enough, without thy information, Greaves. — 
Harkye, fellow, thou see'st the trade which thou 
hast taken up is an unprofitable trade, therefore 
get thee gone, lay aside an occupation by which 
thou can'st gain nothing but a halter, and follow 
that by which thou may'st earn an honest liveli- 
hood/ Having said this, he ordered him to be set 
at liberty against the remonstrances of the bye- 
standers, and insisting upon it that the fellow was 
duly penitent for his offence, bade him go his way 
and never steal again. 

" I leave it with those, who consider mercy as 
one of man's best attributes, to suggest a plea for 

C 2 



20 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the informality of this proceeding, and to such I 
will communicate one other anecdote, which I do 
not deliver upon my own knowledge, though from 
unexceptionable authority, and this is, that when 
Collins had fallen into decay of circumstances, 
Dr. Bentley, suspecting he had written him out of 
credit by his Philoleulherus Lipsiensis, secretly 
contrived to administer to the necessities of his 
baffled opponent, in a manner that did no less cre- 
dit to his delicacy than to his liberality. 

" A morose and over-bearing man will find him- 
self a solitary being in creation ; Doctor Bent- 
ley, on the contrary, had many intimates ; judici- 
ous in forming his friendships, he was faithful in 
adhering to them. With Sir Isaac Newton, Doc- 
tor Mead, Doctor Wallis of Stamford, Baron Span- 
heim, the lamented Roger Cotes, and several 
other distinguished and illustrious contemporaries, 
he lived on terms of uninterrupted harmony, and I 
have good authority for saying, that it is to his in- 
terest and importunity with Sir Isaac Newton, 
that the inestimable publication of the Principia 
was ever resolved upon by that truly great and lu- 
minous philosopher. Newton's portrait by Sir 
James Thornhill, and those of Baron Spanheim, 
and my grandfather, by the same hand, now hang- 
ing in the Master's lodge of Trinity, were the be- 
quest of Doctor Bentley. I was possessed of 
letters, in Sir Isaac's own hand, to my grandfather, 
which, together with the corrected volume of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 21 

Bishop Cumberland's Laws of Nature, I lately 
gave to the library of that flourishing and illustri- 
ous college. 

" His domestic habits, when I knew him, were 
still those of unabated study ; he slept in the room 
adjoining to his library, and was never with his 
family till the hour of dinner; at these times he 
seemed to have detached himself most completely 
from his studies ; never appearing thoughtful and 
abstracted, but social, gay, and possessing perfect 
serenity of mind and equability of temper. He 
never dictated topics of conversation to the com- 
pany he was with, but took them up as they came 
in his way, and was a patient listener to other peo- 
ple's discourse, however trivial or uninteresting- 
it might be. When The Spectators were in publi- 
cation I have heard my mother say, he took great 
delight in hearing them read to him, and was so 
particularly amused by the character of Sir Roger 
de Coverley, that he took his literary decease most 
seriously at heart. She also told me, that, when 
in conversation with him on the subject of his 
works, she found occasion to lament that he had 
bestowed so great a portion of his time and talents 
upon criticism, instead of employing them upon 
original composition, he acknowledged the justice 
of her regret with extreme sensibility, and re- 
mained for a considerable time thoughtful, and 
seemingly embarrassed by the nature of her re- 
mark ; at last recollecting himself, he said, ' Child, 



2# LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

I am sensible I have not always turned my talents 
to the proper use for which, I should presume, 
they were given to me ; yet I have done something 
for the honour of my God, and the edification of 
my fellow creatures ; but the wit and genius of those 
old heathens beguiled me, and as I despaired of 
raising myself up to their standard, upon fair 
ground, I thought the only chance I had of looking 
over their heads was to get upon their shoulders/ 
" Of his pecuniary affairs he took no account ; 
he had no use for money, and dismissed it entirely 
from his thoughts ; his establishment in the mean 
time was respectable, and his table affluently and 
hospitably served. All these matters were con- 
ducted and arranged in the best manner possible, 
by one of the best women living : for such, by the 
testimony of all who knew her, was Mrs. Bentley, 
daughter of Sir John Bernard, of Brampton, in 
Huntingdonshire, a family of great opulence and 
respectability, allied to the Cromwells and Saint 
Johns, and by intermarriages connected with other 
great and noble houses. I have perfect recollec- 
tion of the person of my grandmother, and a full 
impression of her manners and habits, which, 
though in some degree tinctured with hereditary 
reserve and the primitive cast of character, were 
entirely free from the hypocritical cant and affected 
sanctity of the Oliverians. Her whole life was 
modelled on the purest principles of piety, bene- 
volence, and christian charity ; and in her dying 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 23 

moments, my mother being present and voucher of 
the fact, she breathed out her soul in a kind of 
beatific vision, exclaiming in rapture as she ex- 
pired—// is all bright, it is all glorious/" 

To these anecdotes of Bentley I will add one or 
two more, not generally known, being scattered 
through temporary publications. They are too 
good to be lost, and yet too certain to be lost, unless 
incorporated with topics of greater weight ; they 
will repay the trouble of reading, and they may 
perhaps assist some future biographer of Bentley to 
render his work amusing, if his materials prevent 
him from making it instructive. 

Bentley had a long controversy with the Bishop 
of Ely, respecting some alleged malpractices of his 
in his government of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
Bentley defended himself vigorously, and finally 
succeeded in exculpating himself; but, during the 
inquiry that was instituted on both sides, Atter- 
bury hinted to him, in conversation, that he would 
likely lose his cause, in consequence of the dis- 
covery of an old writing, bearing date in James 
the First's time, and which bore against the validity 
of his pretensions. Bentley, who had no great affec- 
tion for Atterbury, and believed him to be secretly 
attached to the Pretender's cause, replied, with 
some seventy, " I know very well what your 
lordship means ; it bears date, I think, anno tertio 
Jacobi primi : it would have more weight with your 
lordship, if it were dated anno primo Jacobi tertii" 



24 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Pope, who condescended to borrow whatever 
he could apply to his wants, and was not very 
scrupulous from whom he took, whether from 
friend or foe, from the eminent or from the mean, 
has engrafted upon the reasonings of Bolingbroke, 
in the Essay on Man, some very just and phi- 
losophical notions which Bentley had promulgated 
in one of his sermons. It is not certain, indeed, 
that the thoughts are original even in Bentley ; 
some of them had undoubtedly been expressed by 
Locke, (Essay on Human Understanding, B. n. 
Ch. xxn i. Sect. 12.) and they are all such as 
might naturally suggest themselves to an acute 
mind employed upon similar topics of reflection. 
But the plagiarism is here perhaps more decisive, 
from the remarkable coincidence which will be 
found between the mode of illustration employed 
by the divine and afterwards by the poet, and the 
sequence of the ideas, which is nearly the same 
in both. It may serve as another proof likewise, 
that the irritable bard acknowledged the prudence 
and propriety of the Roman maxim, fas est ab 
hoste doceri. 

Pope, in the first Epistle of his Essay on 
Man, asks, 

Why has not man a microscopic eye ? 

For this plain reason, man is not a fly. 

Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, 

T" inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n ? 

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, 

To smart and agonize at every pore ? 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 25 

t)r quick effluvia darting through the brain, 

Die of a rose in aromatic pain j 

If nature thunder'd in his op'ning ears, 

And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, 

How would he wish that heav'n had left him still 

The whispering zephyr, and the purling rill ; 

Who finds not Providence all good and wise, 

Alike in what it gives, and what denies ? 



The reader will be struck with the similarity 
between this passage and the following extract 
from Bentley's Sermon on Acts xvn. 27. Part I. 
delivered at Boyle's Lecture. 

" If the eye were so acute, as to rival the finest 
microscopes, and to discern the smallest hair upon 
the leg of a gnat, it would be a curse and not a 
blessing to us : it would make all things appear 
rugged and deformed : the sight of our own selves 
would affright us : the smoothest skin would be 
set over with rugged scales and bristly hairs. 
And beside, we could not see, at one view, above 
what is now the space of an inch, and it would 
take a considerable time to survey the then moun- 
tainous bulk of our own bodies. So, likewise, if our 
sense of hearing were exalted proportionably to 
the former, what a miserable condition would man- 
kind be in ? Whither could we retire from per- 
petual humming and buzzing? Every breath of 
wind would incommode and disturb us : we should 
have no quiet or sleep in the silentest nights and 
most solitary places ; and we must inevitably be 
stricken deaf or dead with the noise of a clap of 
thunder. And the like inconvenience would 



26 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

follow if the sense of feeling were advanced, as the 
Atheist requires. How could we sustain the 
pressure of our cloathes in such a condition : much 
less carry burdens and provide for conveniences of 
life ? We could not bear the assault of an insect, 
or a feather, or a puff of air, without pain. There 
are examples now of wounded persons, that have 
roared for anguish and torment at a discharge of 
ordnance, though at a very great distance : what 
insupportable torture then should we be under, 
when all the whole body would have the tender- 
ness of a wound ?" 

If, from the probability that the same images 
might occur to two persons enforcing the same 
truths, Pope be acquitted of the charge of plagia- 
rism, (an acquittal which I should not easily 
acquiesce in, because of his known literary thefts), 
there will still remain the circumstance of a 
curious coincidence : and, upon comparison, it 
will be found that the illustrations of Bentley are 
sometimes superior to those of Pope : for when 
the latter talks of the " music of the spheres/' 
we are amused with words that have no intelligible 
meaning annexed to them ; but when the former 
tells us that an increased sensibility in our powers 
of hearing would make those sounds dreadful 
which are now either pleasing or hardly per- 
ceptible, the mind at once acquiesces in the just- 
ness of the deduction. If, therefore, Pope did 
borrow from Bentley, he altered his original only 
to corrupt it. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 27 



CHAP. II. 

Some considerations upon self-written memoirs. — 
Rousseau. — Holberg. — Gibbon. — How far 
the memoirs of Cumberland will be used in the 
present work.- — His birth. — His mother s cha- 
racter. — His father s. — The danger of receiving 
posthumous praises. — Cumberland *s backwardness 
as a child. — Educated at Bury St. Edmund's. — 
Anecdotes of Bent leu. — Cumberland' s first pro- 
duction. — Removed to Westminster School. — ■ 
Reflections upon public education. 

Having devoted one Chapter to the ancestors of 
Cumberland, I shall now turn to himself, and 
digest into a coherent narrative the principal 
circumstances of his life. And here it may be 
necessary to state, that what is advanced in the 
following pages, as events that occurred to him, I 
must be understood to deliver upon his testimony, 
unless any other source of information be indicated : 
and for these events I shall, of course, recur to 
that authentic document, his own Memoirs, 
published in his life time, and, as far as I have 
heard, uncontradicted at the period of his death. 
Beyond this, however, he is no further responsible. 
For the opinions that may be delivered, the in- 
ferences that may be deduced, the criticisms that 



53 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

may be hazarded, or the literary disquisitions 
which the contemplation of the period embraced 
by my subject may suggest, the reader is to blame 
or praise me as he happens to be pleased or dis- 
pleased. 

In writing this life it will be my aim to give it 
a character of novelty, and I hope of value, by 
telling what I think myself, rather than repeating 
what has been thought by others. Cumberland's 
Memoirs will always be read as a pleasing accumu- 
lation of literary anecdote, and as a correct register 
of events that befel himself: I mean correct as far 
as he thought it proper to disclose them. What 
he has told, no one has yet disputed : that \ie has 
told all no one supposes : and whether he should 
have told all may be a question with many. It is 
obvious, indeed, that he who sits down to record 
all that he has done, and all that has been done to 
him, assumes to himself a task beyond human 
integrity to perform. Rousseau attempted it, and 
went further than any but an enthusiast like himself 
could have gone : but though he disclosed vices 
and follies, which others might tell of themselves 
if they were weak or mad enough to do it, it may 
be doubted whether even he, in the very fury of 
his candor and adoration of truth, unfolded all. 
Homeland Gibbon have likewise been their own 
biographers : the former has produced a lively 
narrative, and the latter a dignified one ; Holberg, 
perhaps, has communicated as much as posterity 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 29 

will desire to know of him : but every one must 
surely wish to see an adequate life of Gibbon. 

The character of no man can be justly estimated 
either by himself, his friend, or his enemy. The 
office belongs to him who is neither. It belongs 
to the man who has a judgment unbiassed by the 
remembrance of past endearments or enmities : 
who has sagacity to develope the intricate motives 
of human conduct, and who has knowledge enough 
of life to ascertain the moral qualities of every 
action. The writer of his own life, if he attempt 
to do this, will only incur ridicule for failure, or 
contempt for vanity, that believes in its own suc- 
cess : but if he merely shew what has taken place, 
suggest what he believes to have been the cause, 
and tell, with candor, what has been the result, 
he will obtain the commendation he deserves, and 
will transmit to posterity materials of permanent 
utility. This has been done by Cumberland. 
Every reader will allow the decorous circumspec- 
tion with which he commonly alludes to his own 
conduct on particular occasions : and though the 
garrulity of an old man, and too often the vanity of 
a weak one, are suffered to appear, there is an 
evident intention of sincerity throughout the whole 
work, which has a strong claim upon the reader's 
kindness. 

Still, however, it is evident that such a man as 
Cumberland (who was not a Rousseau, and I do 
not speak it invidiously), could not write his own 



30 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

life in such a manner, as should preclude an at- 
tempt like the present. Of his literary produc- 
tions he could say nothing beyond the commemo- 
ration of the several periods of their appearance : 
and as his whole life was little else than a constant 
exertion of his pen, it follows that the chief point 
of view in which his character requires to be con- 
templated, is that very one which he was inevitably 
compelled to leave unfinished. Hence the chief 
motive to my present undertaking ; and hence, 
also, the reader may anticipate what will be its 
prevailing quality. I would not, were it in my 
power, wish to supersede a single line of what he 
has written about himself: but I would write 
something about him, his works, his associates, 
and his friends, which he could not have written 
if he had wished, and which, perhaps, he would 
not have wished to have written if he could. Such 
is my object : and to its performance I now address 
myself. 

Richard Cumberland was born on the 19th of 
February, 1732, in the Master's Lodge of Trinity 
College. He might justly therefore boast of 
having been produced inter silvas Academi. This 
was the residence of Bentley, whose youngest 
daughter, Joanna, the grandson of Bishop Cum- 
berland, married. She was the Phoebe of Byron's 
well known pastoral, published in the eighth 
volume of the Spectator ; but we are not told 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 31 

whether the poet celebrated her as the object of 
real affection, or as the mistress of his muse only, 
for every writer of amatory verses may be sus- 
pected of sacrificing truth to fiction. She was a 
woman of valuable qualities according to her son's 
testimony. She seems to have inherited many of 
her father's endowments of mind ; quick in appre- 
hension, correct in her application of what she 
knew, and of strong memory. She delighted also 
in the ridiculous, and was fond, too fond, of cm- 
ploying that unsafe test of truth; a partiality for 
which, indeed, is nearly allied to disingenuousness, 
and too apt to corrupt our social qualities, by 
making them subservient to the single purpose of 
raising a laugh at the expense of our own humanity 
and the rights of friendship. Yet, with this strong 
propensity to the easiest of all conversation, she 
was often taciturn, where her discourse was 
eagerly expected, and would sometimes display 
her powers in company that had little relish for 
intellectual exhibitions. She was religious, and 
rarely, says Cumberland, " passed a day in which 
she failed to devote a portion of her time to the 
reading of the bible ; and her comments and expo- 
sitions might have merited the attention of the 
wise and learned." In this piety, however, there 
was no gloom ; a convincing proof of the solidity 
of her judgment ; for religion, operating upon a 
weak mind, commonly produces either hypocrisy 
or despondency. Cumberland concludes his ac- 



32 tIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

count of her with this emphatic declaration : " All 
that son can owe to parent, or disciple to his 
teacher, I owe to her/' 

Of his father he speaks with equal, if not greater 
praise. I do not wish to imply the smallest doubt 
of his sincerity, or of the sincerity of any man 
who is employed in the pleasing and solemn task 
of decking a parent's grave with honours. It is 
an office so consonant to the simplest and most 
amiable feelings of the human heart, and one 
which so certainly bespeaks the good-will of man- 
kind, that he would be hated as cynical or unna- 
tural, who should offer to degrade it from its sanc- 
tity. Yet, the encomiums which are bestowed 
upon the dead are always to be suspected ; and 
especially when, in the dead, we record the virtues 
of a father or a mother. The tomb is a veil which 
nature draws over the frailties of its inhabitants, 
and they who survive remember only their good 
qualities. It should be so, I acknowledge. For 
their errors, whatever they may have been, they 
are accountable to a tribunal that is not an earthly 
one ; but their virtues, their kindnesses to us, 
while living, should find an inviolable sanctuary 
in our bosoms. Nay, there is in death something 
so solemn, so final as to this world, so powerful in 
disarming us of our resentments, and in magnify- 
ing our love and veneration, that we usually forget 
not only what was bad in those who are no more, 
but, in remembering their merits we remember 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 33 

more than they had. Hence the infidelity of mo- 
numental inscriptions ; and hence, too, the pious 
exaggeration with which we recount the virtues 
of a deceased parent or friend. The well known 
maxim of the ancients (de mortuis nihil nisi bonumj 
may seem superfluous, for of the dead we rarely 
speak but with tenderness and veneration ; I ex- 
cept public characters, which are always public 
property in all generations ; and I except the ran- 
cour of disappointed hopes, or the malignity of a 
revengeful heart ; for to the former death is no se- 
curity from malice, and to the latter nothing is 
sacred. A modern writer (I forget who) pro- 
posed to read vermn, instead of bonum, in the 
above adage ; but the folly of the emendation was 
at least equal to its cruelty. 

With this disposition in our hearts, and planted 
there by the hand of nature herself, thus to exalt 
the characters of deceased relatives, it will always 
behove us to receive with caution testimonials of 
their excellence, coming from those to whom such 
prejudices may be imputed. Were we indeed to 
believe all that the enthusiastic fondness and ve- 
neration of survivors would have us, I know not 
where we should find space to deposit the records 
of such countless claimants upon the notice and 
regard of mankind, as would arise. But the delu- 
sion, amiable as it is> is known ; and we are in no 
danger of exhausting folios to register the names 
of the grea^, the good, and the wise. 

D 



34 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

From this charge of unintentional deception, 
however, I am perfectly willing to exonerate Cum- 
berland in what he says of his own father. The 
descendant of such a man as the Bishop of Peter- 
borough, has an hereditary claim to our belief of his 
virtues, if he have not flagrantly destroyed it by 
the turpitude of his life. 

" He was educated/' says he, " at Westminster 
school, and from that admitted fellow commoner 
of Trinity College, in Cambridge. He married at 
the age of twenty-two, and though in possession of 
an independent fortune, was readily prevailed upon 
by his father-in-law, Doctor Bentley, to take the 
rectory of Stanwick, in the county of Northamp- 
ton, given to him by Lord Chancellor King, as 
soon as he was of age to hold it. From this pe- 
riod he fixed his constant residence in that retired 
and tranquil spot, and sedulously devoted himself 
to the duties of his function. When I contemplate 
the character of this amiable man, I declare to 
truth I never yet knew one so happily endowed 
with those engaging qualities, which are formed 
to attract and fix the love and esteem of mankind. 
It seemed as if the whole spirit of his grandfather's 
benevolence had been transfused into his heart, 
and that he bore as perfect a resemblance of him 
in goodness, as he did in person; in moral purity 
he was truly a Christian, in generosity and honour 
he was perfectly a gentleman." 

Cumberland was not the elder child. He had a 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 35 

sister, Joanna, who outstripped him both in years 
and knowledge; for he represents himself as unto- 
ward in his infancy, and profiting little from the 
assiduous attentions of his mother. This reproach, 
however, he soon wiped off; and when he once 
began to move, it was with rapidity. He de- 
scribes himself as being involved in a confusion of 
ideas, natural to a young mind, when he first read 
the 115th psalm, which records the destruction of 
heathen idols, and is considered by Delany, and, I 
believe, by Home, (fori write from memory) as a 
triumphal song for David's victory over the Jebu- 
sites. The contradiction of terms in the 5th, 6th, 
and 7th verses, was, to Cumberland, a contradic- 
tion of ideas which his infant and unassisted rea- 
son could not disentangle ; but it might surely 
have been rendered intelligible to him by his mo- 
ther, had he proposed to her his difficulties, for it 
may be made so to the youngest mind ; though 
Cumberland seems to think otherwise, by the hint 
which he insinuates as to the " moral" of the 
Y incident/' 

When he was in his sixth year he was sent to 
the school of Bury St. Edmunds, at that time kept 
by Arthur Kinsman. It was then in high reputa- 
tion, and educated a hundred and fifty boys. His 
progress, here, was very inauspicious at first, for he 
soon descended to the lowest seat in the lowest 
class, save one, of the school. How long he 
might have remained in this state of degradation is 

1)2 



36 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

uncertain, but his master, who probably disco- 
vered the latent talents of the boy beneath the 
natural indolence of his character, (for he had ven- 
tured to prophecy to Bentley, that he would make 
his grandson as good a scholar as himself; to which 
the haughty pedant replied, " Pshaw, Arthur, 
how can that be, when I have forgot more than 
thou ever knew'st?"*) effectually roused him 
from the torpor which seemed to possess his facul- 
ties. He did this in a manner well calculated to 
fire a generous mind with emulation. 

One day he called the loitering school-boy to 
his chair; there was an unbroken, and to the de- 
linquent, an awful silence in the room ; every eye 
was fixed upon him, every ear was attentive ; all 
was solemn expectation in the youthful assembly. 
Kinsman reproved him in a tone of voice loud 
enough to render every syllable of what he said 
audible ; and, among other topics of reprehension,, 
he asked him in what manner he was to report his 
progress to his grandfather Bentley ? At that name 
the young offender trembled, for even then he had 
learned to venerate it : he was abashed and con- 
founded ; he felt all the force of the question, and 
a fervent resolution awoke within him to redeem 
the hours he had trifled away, and justify the 

* Pointed and sarcastic replies are successively related, with little ad- 
herence to truth. I have seen this answer of Bentley's applied to Doctor 
Gooch, as the person who provoked it. " I have forgotten," said the awful 
dristarch, " more learning than he possesses." It is likely, however, 
that Cumberland would be right. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 37 

hopes of his master and his illustrious grandfather. 
This resolution was not a momentary blaze, emit- 
ting a transitory heat and lustre, and then sinking 
into smoke and darkness ; it was a fire kindled in 
his bosom which kept his purpose warm, and the 
good effect of the admonition, thus judiciously 
applied, operated probably for many years upon 
the progress of his studies. 

Shortly after this occurrence, however, he fell 
ill, and was removed home, where he languished 
in sickness for some time. When he returned to 
school he soon recovered the good opinion of Kins- 
man, by his diligence and regularity. 

About this time Bentley died, and Cumberland, 
who was old enough to know something of the loss 
of such a man, lamented it with as much sorrow 
as can belong, without hypocrisy, to boyhood. 
Of this great man, before we take a final leave, (if 
indeed this can be called such, as I shall have occa- 
sion to mention him again, in noticing the contro- 
versy between Cumberland and Mr. Hayley) the 
reader may not be displeased to read the following 
anecdotes ; or if he be, his displeasure cannot hold 
him long, for they are very brief. 

In a conversation between Kinsman and Bent- 
ley, upon the merits of Homer, Kinsman quoted 
Joshua Barnes as a man well versed in Greek, and 
speaking it almost like his mother tongue. "Yes,'* 
replied Bentley, " I do believe that Barnes had as 



38 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

much Greek, and understood it about as well, as 
an Athenian blacksmith.* 

Of Wai burton, then just rising into fame, he 
said, " there seemed to be in him a voracious ap- 
petite for knowledge ; he doubted if there was a 
good digestion/' 

His opinion of Pope's Homer is awkwardly re- 
lated by Cumberland. A better account is the 
following, which was communicated to the " Gen- 
tleman's Magazine," by a correspondent, in the 
year 1778, and which contains an anecdote of the 
poet likewise, not very generally known, I be- 
lieve. 

Atterbury, having Pope and Bentley both at his 
table one day, insisted upon knowing the latter's 
opinion of the English Homer. He evaded the 
question thus put, for some time; but being 
pressed by Atterbury, heat last said, " The verses 
are good verses, but the work is not Homer, it is 



* This anecdote I have seen differently related, and in a manner more 
like Bentley. " Barnes," said he, " had some knowledge in the Greek 
language ; almost as much as an Athenian cobbler, but was, in all other 
respects, a very poor creature indeed : felicis memorice, as the burlesque 
epitaph upon him, says : expectans judicium. See a paper of verses upon 
him in the Muss Anglicanae, entitled ' Sub Professor Linguas Graecse,' 
which shews what a contempt even the boys at Cambridge had for him." 

It may be doubted, however, whether there be not more praise than cen- 
sure in ascribing to Barnes as much Greek as an Athenian cobbler pos- 
sessed ; especially if there be any truth in the opinion which Addison has 
somewhere expressed, that a Roman ploughman probably spoke purer 
Latin than the most accomplished modern scholar. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. S[) 

Spondamus." To this provocation, which Atter- 
bury probably anticipated, and secretly wished, 
perhaps, for he bore Bentley no good will, may be 
ascribed Pope's known hostility to the modern 
Aristarchus ; but when he appeared in the Dun- 
ciad, his son, Dr. Richard Bentley, was so in- 
censed, that he sent the poet a challenge. Pope 
communicated this to some of his friends who 
were officers in the army, and who, deeming it 
preposterous that a man of his personal deformity 
should accept a challenge, w T aited upon the chal- 
lenger, told him their reasons for Pope's declining 
the business, and offered him the choice of either 
of themselves as a proxy on the occasion. But 
this did not suit the doctor's courage, and thus 
the business dropped. 

Kinsman communicated the death of Bentley to 
his grandson with much tenderness, and kindly 
strove to soothe the little sorrows which he ex- 
pected the intelligence might create. The sor- 
rows were transient, and the pupil resumed his 
vigorous determination of earning the approbation 
of his master. Success followed : he soon reached 
the highest place in the school, and kept it, though 
he mentions, among his competitors, the late Dr. 
Warren, and his brother the bishop. 

Cumberland has not been very exact in his 
dates, and what he has omitted it cannot be ex- 
pected that I should supply. This deficiency oc- 
casions much perplexity in reading his Memoirs, 



40 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and must have been the effect either of intention or 
of negligence, for it cannot have been that he who 
remembered every thing which happened, should 
have forgotten when it happened. 

During the time that he was with Kinsman, he 
produced his first attempt in English verse ; but 
the subject was as ill chosen as the performance 
was wretched, if the whole may be judged from 
the little that is preserved. He made an excur- 
sion with his family into Hampshire, and he 
thought a description of his journey, of the Docks 
at Portsmouth, and of the races at Winchester, 
would harmonise well with English heroics. The 
following was one of the couplets : 

Here they weave cables, there they mainmasts form, 
Here they forge anchors— useful in a stortn. 

These lines his mother very justly ridiculed ; 
but his father, from what motive it is not easy to 
conjecture, strenuously defended and approved 
them. Literary puerilities should be sparingly 
commended ; for the surest way to make a matured 
coxcomb is to praise infant follies. 

After the death of Bentley his father resided 
wholly at the parsonage-house of Stanwick, near 
High am Ferrars. in Northamptonshire ; a rural 
retreat, of which Cumberland speaks with tender 
emotion, associated, as it must have been, in his 
mind, with the recollections of those blessed hours 
Qf life which no man looks back upon but with 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 41 

regret. Here it was that he partook, during the 
school vacations, of the dangerous, unmanly, and 
cruel diversion of hunting with his father ; and 
here it was too, that his excellent mother, with 
anxious solicitude, began to form his mind to just 
principles of taste, piety, and knowledge. The 
defective system of modern female education too 
seldom qualifies a woman for that pleasing office, 
the first education of her children, which, as Rous- 
seau justly observes, seems to have been intended 
for her by nature herself. Household cares and 
domestic management are made the chief business 
of a woman's life, to the utter exclusion of all 
ornamental, of all elegant, and of all useful acquire- 
ments. She is degraded from her station, as the 
companion of man, to be his servant and his 
drudge: the meanest employments of home de- 
volve to her management ; the kitchen is consi- 
dered as her hereditary and peculiar place of ac- 
tion ; and, if to her skill in culinary matters, and 
certain other familiar branches of knowledge, there 
be added a handsome person, something to excite 
desire as well as gratify it, her character is deemed 
complete, and she takes her station in society ac- 
cordingly. When married, her husband, if his 
mind be not as earthly as his body, is the first to 
discover that a wife may be very respectable, and 
very useful, who is thus endowed ; but that she 
wants the qualifications of a companion, of a being 
who can share his intellectual as well as his mate- 



42 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

rial pleasures ; and that as he cannot be contented 
always with endearments, however sincere, nor 
dalliances however pleasing ; as he cannot always 
find the pleasure he wants in the narrow resources 
of his wife's mind, and yet cannot make life toler- 
able without them, he seeks from home those de- 
lights, the presence of which can alone make home 
the chosen spot of comfort to the married man. 
His children too, if he have any, possess in their 
mother, a nurse, an affectionate one, while they 
need it; a watchful attendant in their earliest 
years ; a patient comforter in all their little 
troubles, illnesses, and misfortunes ; but when 
they ask an instructress, when their infant minds 
begin to feel the wants of reason, when that active 
and restless faculty is awakening within them, and 
clamorous for sustenance, then, even then, at the 
tenderest period of intercourse between them, the 
mother is removed to make way for hired tutors, 
and that gentle sympathy and affection which the 
process of instruction so certainly generates be- 
tween the parent and the child, between the sup- 
plicator for knowledge and the dispenser of it, is 
lost for ever. 

Is not this a mournful consideration ? and is 
it not deeply to be lamented, that an evil, so 
closely affecting our private happiness, should re- 
main, to a certain degree, unredressed ? 1 rejoice, 
indeed, to add, that the prejudices which exist 
with regard to what are contemptuously denomi- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. . 43 

nated learned ladies, are disappearing fast before 
the steady light of science and reason ; and the 
time may not be far distant when we shall cease to 
choose our wives as we would our servants, for 
kitchen excellence, or as the voluptuary does his 
mistress, for personal charms alone ; when, in 
short, we shall select, in our partners for life, com- 
panions for ourselves, and instructors for our 
children. 

The incalculable advantages of a rational and 
enlightened mother were powerfully felt both by 
Sir William Jones and by Cumberland, both of 
whom ascribe to their early maternal tuition that 
ardor for knowledge by which they were afterwards 
distinguished, though in very different degrees, 
and which led to very different degrees of emi- 
nence. From this pleasing source of instruction 
Cumberland drew copious draughts. Their even- 
ings were spent in literary acquisition. His ear 
was formed to poetical harmony, by reading to his 
mother, " of which art," says he, " she was a 
very able mistress/' These exercises were, with 
few exceptions, confined to the works of Shaks- 
peare, and she directed his mind to a just appre- 
ciation of that writer's merits. Her taste was re- 
fined, and her judgment extremely accurate ; and 
she diligently pointed out to her son the blemishes, 
the incongruities, and the affectation, as well as 
the sublime beauties and exquisite delineations of 



44 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

life by which the English bard is almost equally 
distinguished. In these evening lectures his fa- 
ther joined, also, occasionally ; but " his voice 
was never heard but in the tone of approbation ; 
his countenance never marked, but with the natu- 
ral traces of his indelible and hereditary benevo- 
lence/' 

Where there is a natural or an acquired disposi- 
tion to literary effort, that disposition will be in- 
creased by familiarity with the best authors ; and 
hence Cumberland, from reading Shakspeare, 
formed the bold design of writing from him. At 
this time he was only twelve years of age, and I 
consider the performance so creditable to his early 
genius, that I shall transcribe that part of it here, 
which the author has chosen to preserve. It was 
a kind of cento, entitled Shakspeare in the Shades, 
and formed into one act, selecting the characters 
of Hamlet and Ophelia, Romeo and Juliet, Lear 
and Cordelia, as the persons of the drama. To 
Shakspeare, who is continually in the scene, Ariel 
is given as an attendant spirit, and the following 
motto was selected for the title page : 

Ast alii sex, 
Et plures, uno conclamant ore. 

" The scene/' says Cumberland, " is laid in 
Elysium, where the poet is discovered, and opens 
the drama with the following address : 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 43 

" ' Most fair and equal hearers, know, that 
whilst this soul inhabited its fleshly tabernacle, 
I was called Shakspeare ; a greater name and more 
exalted honours have dignified its dissolution. 
Blest with a liberal portion of the divine spirit, as 
a tribute due to the bounty of the Gods, I left be-^ 
hind me an immortal monument of my fame. 
Think not that I boast ; the actions of departed 
beings may not be censured by any mortal wit, 
nor are accountable to any earthly tribunal. Let 
it suffice, that in the grave — 

When we have shuffled off this mortal coyle—~ 

All envy and detraction, all pride and vain-glory 
are no more ; still a grateful remembrance of hu^ 
manity, and a tender regard for our posterity on 
earth, follow us to this happy seat ; and it is in 
this regard I deign once more to salute you with 
my favoured presence, and am content to be again an 
actor for your sakes. I have been attentive to your 
sufferings at my mournful scenes ; guardian of that 
virtue, which I left in distress, I come now, the 
instrument of Providence, to compose your sor- 
rows, and restore to it the proportioned reward. 
Those bleeding characters, those martyred wor- 
thies, whom I have sent untimely to the shades, 
shall now, at length, and in your sight, be crowned 
with their beloved retribution, and the justice, 
which* as their poet, I withheld from them, as the 

/ 



46 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

arbiter and disposer of their fate, I will award to 
them ; but for the villain and the adulterer — 

The perjured and the simular man of virtue — 

the proud, the ambitious, and the murderer I 
shall— 

" Leave such to heaven 
And to those thorns, that in their bosoms lodge 
To prick and sting' them . — 

But soft ! I see one corning, that often hath be- 
guiled you of your tears— the fair Ophelia — \ 

" The several parties now make their respective 
appeals, and Shakspeare finally summons them all 
before him by his agent Ariel, for whose intro- 
duction he prepares the audience by the following 
soliloquy : — 

" ( Now comes the period of my high commission : 

All have been heard, and all shall be restor'd, 

All errors blotted out and all obstructions, 

Mortality entails, shall be remov'd, 

And from the mental eye the film withdrawn. 

Which in its corporal union had obscur'd 

And clouded the pure virtue of its sight. 

But to these purposes I must employ 

My ready spirit Ariel, some time minister 

To Prospero, and the obsequious slave 

Of his enchantments, from whose place preferred 

He here attends to do me services, 

And qualify these beings for Elysium — 

Hoa ! Ariel, approach my dainty spirit ! 

" (Ariel Enters.) 
" All hail, great master, grave Sir, hail! I come 
To answer thy best pleasure ; be it to fly. 
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 47 

On tlie curled clouds — to thy strong lidding task 
Ariel and all Ms qualities— 

" Shahspeare. 

" ' Know then, spirit. 
Into tnis grove six shades consign'd to bliss 
I've separately rernov'd, of each sex three ; 
Unheard of one another and unseen 
There they abide, yet each to each endear'd 
By ties of strong affection : not the same 
Their several objects, though the effects alike, 
But husband, father, lover make the change. 
Now though the body's perished, yet are they 
Fresh from their sins and bleeding with their wrongs ; 
Therefore all sense of injury remove, 
fleal up their wounded faculties anew, 
And pluck affliction's arrow from their hearts ; 
Refine their passions, for gross sensual love 
Let it become a pure and faultless friendship, 
Raise and confirm their joys, let them exchange 
Their fleeting pleasures for immortal peace : 
This done, with speed conduct them each to other 
So chang'd, and set the happy choir before me.' 

" I have the whole of this puerile production, 
written in a schoolboy's hand, which by some 
chance has escaped the general wreck, in which I 
have lost some records, that I should now be glad 
to resort to. I am not quite sure that I act fairly 
by my readers when I give any part of it a place 
in these memoirs, yet as an instance of the im- 
pression, which my mother's lectures had made 
upon my youthful fancy, and perhaps as a sample 
of composition indicative of more thought and 
contrivance, than are commonly to be found in 
boys at so very early an age, I shall proceed to 



4$ LltfE OF CUMBERLAND, 

transcribe the concluding part of the scene, in 
which Romeo has his audience, and can truly 
affirm that the copy is faithful without the altera- 
tion or addition of a single word : — 

" Romeo i 

" ' — Oh thou, the great disposer of my fate, 1 
Judge of my actions, patron of my cause, 
Tear not asunder such united hearts, 
But give me up to love and to my Juliet. 

11 Shahspeare. 

l( ' Unthinking youth, thou dost forget thyself; 

Rash inconsiderate boy, must I again 

Remind thee of thy fate ? What ! know'st thou not 

The man, whose desperate hand foredoes himself, 

Is dooin'd to wander on the Stygian shore 

A restless shade, forlorn and comfortless, 

For a whole age ? Nor shall he hope to sooth 

The callous ear of Charon, till he win 

His passion by repentance and submission 

At this my fixt tribunal, else be sure 

The wretch shall hourly pace the lazy wharf 

To view the beating of the Stygian wave, 

And waste his irksome leisure.' 

" Romeo. 

Gracious powers, 

Is this my doom, my torment — •? Heaven is here 

Where Juliet lives, ana each unworthy thing 

Lives here in heaven and may look on her, 

But Romeo may not : more validity, 

More honourable state, more worship lives 

In carrion fiies than Romeo ; they may seize 

On the white wonder of my love's dear hand, 

And steal immortal blessings from her lips, 

But Romeo may not ; t He is doom'd to bear 

An age's pain and sigh in banishment, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 49 

To drag a restless being on the shore 
Of gloomy Styx, and weep into the flood, 
Till, with his tears made full, the briny stream.' 
Shall kiss the most exalted sho? es of all. 

" Shakspeare. 

" ' Now then dost thou repent thy follies past ? 

" Romeo. 

li ' Oh, ask me if I feel my torments present, 

Then judge if I repent my follies past. 

Had I but powers to tell you what I feel, 

A tongue to speak my heart's unfeign'd contrition, 

Then might I lay the bleeding part before you : 

But 'twill not be — something I yet would say 

To extenuate my crime ; I fain would plead 

The merit of my love — but I have done — 

However hard my sentence, I submit. 

My faithless tongue turns traitor to my heart, 

And will not utter what it fondly prompts ; 

A rising gust of passion drowns my voice, 

And I'm most dumb when I've most need to sue. 

" (Kneels.) 
" Shakspeare. 

" l Arise, young Sir ! before my mercy-seat 

None kneel in vain ; repentance never lost 
The cause she pleaded. Mercy is the proof, 
The test that marks a character divine ; 
Were ye like merciful to one another, 
The earth would be a heaven and men the gods. 
Withdraw awhile ; I see thy heart is full ; 
Grief at a crime committed merits more 
Than exultation for a duty done. 

" (Romeo withdraws) , 

" Shakspeare remains and speaks — 

" ' What rage is this, O man, that thou should'st dare 
To turn unnatural butcher on thyself, 
And thy presumptuous violent hand uplift 
Against that fabrick which the Gods have rais'd ? 

E 



50 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Insolent wretch, did that presumptuous hand 

Temper thy wond'rous frame ? Did that bold spirit 

Inspire the quicken'd clay with living breath ? 

Do not deceive thyself. Have the kind Gods 

Lent their own goodly image to thy use 

For thee to break at pleasure ? — 

What are thy merits ? Where is thy dominion ? 

If thou aspir'st to rule, rule thy desires. 

Thou poorly turn'st upon thy helpless body, 

And hast no heart to check thy growing sins : 

Thou gain'st a mighty victory o'er thy life, 

But art enslaved to thy basest passions, 

And bowest to the anarchy within thee. 

Oh ! have a care 

Lest at thy great account thou should'st be found 

A thriftless steward of thy master's substance. 

'Tis his to take away, or sink at will, 

Thou but the tenant to a greater lord, 

Nor maker, nor the monarch of thyself.' " 



There are some good lines in this juvenile 
effusion ; and though it cannot rank with Pope's 
** Ode to Solitude/' nor with some of the early 
compositions of Milton and Cowley, it at least 
deserves praise for harmony of versification and 
correctness of ideas. 

Shortly after this, he was removed to West- 
minster School, as his old master Kinsman in- 
timated his intention of retiring from a station the 
duties of which became too laborious for his in- 
creasing age and infirmities. He passed his ex- 
amination before the master, (Dr. Nichols) in a 
manner highly reputable to himself, and to his 
late instructor ; and he was admitted accordingly. 
Here, among his associates, were the Earl of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 51 

Huntingdon, the late Earl of Bristol, the late Earl 
of Buckinghamshire, the late Duke of Richmond, 
Colman, and Lloyd. The opportunities thus pre- 
sented of laying the foundation of intimacies with 
men capable and likely to advance our fortunes 
in after life, are among the strongest arguments 
which the supporters of a public system of edu- 
cation have to advance. They are indeed argu- 
ments of great weight and importance ; but I fear 
the instances are fewer than might be hoped where 
school-connexions have ripened into those of 
manhood ; or where the noble play-mate has re- 
membered his fellow when the lapse of years has 
led him to the possession of honours, wealth, and 
influence. Some cases, no doubt, may be adduced 
in opposition to this, proving the ultimate benefit 
of friendships formed at so early a period of life 
between boys of elevated and inferior conditions: 
and I wish, indeed, that they may be numerous, 
for I am afraid they are the only advantages which 
can be plausibly urged against the many evils 
attendant upon public -education. The almost 
certain ruin of the moral character, the contagion 
of vice, the destruction of that simplicity of man- 
ners which is at once the offspring and the defence 
of virtue, the assumption of rude and boisterous 
habits which deform the outward man and corrupt 
his general demeanor, and the gradual relaxation 
of those ties of kindred by which social life is sup- 
ported and adorned, are some of the evils to be 

E 2 



5% LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

expected from public education ; while they may 
all be avoided, and every certain benefit secured, (for 
that which may arise from serviceable connexions 
is but contingent) by private instruction. I know 
that " much may be said on both sides," to use 
the prudent maxim of Sir Roger de Coverley : nor 
is this exactly the place to say much on either : 
but my own opinion is unquestionably in favour 
of private tuition where the condition of the 
parents enables them to retain a sufficient number 
of able masters. 

It is certain that Cumberland did not experience 
that single advantage of public education, for I do 
not remember that any of his patrician school- 
fellows were afterwards either his friends or patrons. 
But he secured to himself that which neither the 
smiles nor frowns of nobility could give or take 
away : he laboured with unremitting assiduity at 
his studies, gained the confidence and approbation 
of his master, and established the basis of any 
superstructure which he might afterwards wish to 
rear. In prosecuting these advances in knowledge 
he was powerfully stimulated by the gentle and 
flattering encouragements of Dr. Nichols, whose 
kindness of manner was directly distinguished 
from the austere dominion of Kinsman. " Arthur 
Kinsman,," Cumberland observes, " certainly 
knew how to make his boys scholars ; Dr. Nichols 
had the art of making his scholars gentlemen : for 
there was a court of honour in that school, to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 53 

whose unwritten laws every member of our com- 
munity was amenable, and which, to transgress by 
any act of meanness that exposed the offender to 
public contempt, was a degree of punishment, 
compared to which the being sentenced to the rod 
would have been considered as an acquittal or 
reprieve :" and in another place he observes, " it 
was evidently his principle to cherish every spark 
of genius, which he could discover in his scholars, 
and seemed determined so to exercise his authority 
that our best motives for obeying him should 
spring from the affection that we had for him." 

To study under such auspices must have been 
at once a work of pleasure and of profit : the plea- 
sure was in deserving the applause of such a man : 
the profit in being competent to obtain it ; and 
when our duty is sweetened to us by the blandish- 
ments of praise, we perform it with an alacrity 
which teaches the value of that stimulus w T hen 
not abused by indiscriminate application. 



34 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. III. 

The fleeting qualities of histrionic fame. — Cumber- 
land's first poetical attempt. — The requisites and 
difficulties of blank verse. — Death of his sister. — 
His assiduity at College. — His success. — His sen- 
timents regarding an academical education. — 
His want of an adequate director in his studies. — 
Mason s Elfrida and Caractacus. — On the ap- 
plicability of the Greek chorus to the English 
stage. 

During the period that he was at Westminster 
school, he was received as a boarder into the house 
of Edmund Ashby, Esq. a distant relation of his 
father's. This gentleman resided in Peter-street, 
and partly from the angustce res domi, and partly, 
perhaps, from a sullen apathy of heart and mind, 
his house was distinguished by all the gloomy se- 
clusion of an ascetic's cell. " I might as well," 
says Cumberland, " have boarded in the convent 
of La Trappe." 

But though all merriment was driven away from 
the doors of this inhospitable mansion, its tenants 
were sometimes allowed to seek the haunts of 
pleasure in her own dominion, for Cumberland first 
beheld while here, what no pen has ever been able 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5$ 

to describe — the acting of Garrick*. What he felt 
on this occasion, he has vividly described. The 
character which he performed was Lothario in the 
Fair Penitent, and Quin played Horatio. Quin 
was at the head of the old school of acting, and 
Garrick was proudly zealous in founding the new. 
The town was yet divided where to bestow the 
meed of conquest, upon nature or on art; but the 
issue of the contest was not long dubious ; nature 
and Garrick triumphed, and from his day to the 
present, the stage has been gradually emancipat- 
ing itself from the shackles of absurd custom, and 

* Nor can any pen describe what must be seen, felt, and heard, to be 
understood. So perishable is the glory of those who delight us most when 
living, but of whom we can deliver no remembrance to posterity that will 
justify our admiration. This brevity of an actor's fame, has been feel- 
ingly enforced by Schiller, in the following lines : 

Den schnell und spurlos geht des Mimen Kunst, 

Die wunderbare, an dem sinn voriiber, 

Wenn das gebild des Meisels, der gesang 

Des dichter's nach jahrtausenden noch leben. 

Hier stirbt der zauber mit dem kiinstler ab, 

Und wie der klang verhallet in dem ohr, 

Verrauscht des augenblicks geschwinde schopfung, 

Und ihren ruhm bewahrt kein daurend werk. 

Schwer ist die kunst, verganglich ist ihr preis, 

Dem Mimen flicht die nachwelt keine kranze, 

Drum muss er geitzen mit der gegenwart, 

Den Augenblick, der sein ist, ganz erfullen, 

Muss seiner mitwelt machtig sich versichern, 

Und im gefiihl der wiirdigesten und besten 

Ein lebend denkmal sich erbaun. — So nimmt er 

Sich seines namens Ewigkeit voraus, 

Denn wer den besten seiner zeit genug 

Gethan, der hat gelebt fur alle zeiten. Wajilensteix, 



66 LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 

the authoritative follies of long prescription. Gar- 
rick rescued it from the pompous tones of unnatu- 
ral declamation ; and a living actor has success- 
fully exerted himself to rescue it from the pedan- 
tries of dress and decoration ; for it must be re- 
membered that even Garrick used to perform 
Macbeth and Cato in a bag wig, sword, and 
ruffles. 

While. Cumberland was at the house of Mr. 
Ashby, he had solitude and leisure enough to pur- 
sue his studies ; and among other efforts of his 
pen he attempted a translation of a passage in 
Virgil's Georgics. It was that fine description of 
the plague among the cattle. He adopted blank 
verse as the vehicle of his attempt ; but his ear was 
not yet tuned to the various melody of which that 
mode of writing is susceptible, and which indeed it 
requires to render it tolerable ; neither does he 
seem to have possessed a reach of language suffi- 
cient to diversify its cadences, or to express, with 
vigour, the images of his original. Blank verse, 
more than any other species of poetic measure, 
demands an exuberant variety of structure to ren- 
der it melodious, a skilful intermixture of pauses, 
and a suitable dignity of words* to maintain the 
elevation of the whole. In proportion as it is 
without the extraneous aid of rime, it needs that 
of pomp and splendour; nor do I know any thing- 
more irksome than to peruse pages of imbecility, 
divided into lines of ten syllables each, without 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 57 

even the ear-deep charm of the final correspon- 
dence in the sound of each line. Of writers in 
blank verse I know only three in our language 
who have succeeded : Milton, Thomson, and 
Akenside ; and they have succeeded by employ- 
ing a mode of versification essentially distinct 
from each other. Many have tried it, and 
have acquired a certain portion of applause ; but, 
if we except Armstrong (who, however, cannot be 
ranked with the three I have named,) it is perhaps 
easier to praise than to read their performances. 
A turgid phraseology is often mistaken for the 
easy dignity which blank verse should have : and 
sometimes, in attempting to be graceful without 
ostentation, the writer sinks into meanness 
and imbecility. Yet, when in the hands of a mas« 
ter, how lofty and sonorous is its march, how ani- 
mating are its periods, and how sublime are its 
elevations, while its occasional descents serve only 
to heighten the contrast and to delight by opposi- 
tion. The difficulties which beset it, however, seem 
calculated to secure its rarity, and to shield it 
from the profanation of every daring hand. 

That Cumberland, at the period we are now 
speaking of, was but feebly endowed with powers 
to strike so lofty a strain, the following extract, 
from the long fragment w r hich he has chosen to 
preserve, will shew ; but it will also shew a preco- 
city of classical attainment, and a general power 
of composition, which were highly meritorious at 



58 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

such an age. Few could have exceeded him* 
while many would have wholly failed in the com- 
parison : — 

" * The lab'ring ox, while o'er the furrow'd land 
He trails the tardy plough, down drops at once, 
Forth issues bloody foam, till the last groan 
Gives a long close to his labours : The sad hind 
Unyokes his widow'd and complainful mate, 
Leaving the blasted and imperfect work 
Where the fix'd ploughshare points the luckless spot. 
The shady covert, where the lofty trees 
Form cool retreat, the lawns, whose springing herb 
Yields food ambrosial, the transparent stream, 
Which o'er the jutting stones to th' neighb'ring mead 
Takes its fantastic course, these now no more 
Delight, as they were wont, rather afflict, 
With him they cheer'd, with him their joys expir'd, 
Joys only in participation dear : 
Famine instead stares in his hollow sides, 
His leaden eye-balls, motionless and fix'd, 
Sleep in their sockets, his unnerved neck 
Hangs drooping down, death lays his load upon him^ 
And bows him to the ground — what now avail 
His useful toils, his life of service past ? 
What though* full oft he turn'd the stubborn glebe, 
It boots not now — yet have these never felt 
The ills of riot and intemperate draughts, 
Where the full goblet crowns the luscious feast,: 
Their only feast to graze the springing herb 
O'er the fresh lawn, or from the pendant bough 
To crop the savoury leaf, from the clear spring, 
Or active stream refined in its course, 
They slake their sober thirst, their sweet repose 
Nor cares forbid, nor soothing arts invite, 
But pure digestion breeds and light repast.' " 

His knowledge of the English language was yet 
unsettled, or he would not have used an epithet 
(complainful) not to be found in any other writer. 






LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 59 

His family now sustained a heavy affliction in 
the death of his sister Joanna, whose early supe- 
riority over her brother has been mentioned, and 
who fell a victim to the small pox, that peculiar 
curse and scourge of human nature, whose wide- 
wasting empire has been destroyed, in recent times, 
by a discovery accidental in itself, simple in its 
operation, and most beneficial in its effects. A 
few persons, actuated by ignorance, artifice, or 
weakness, have disputed the efficacy of this pre- 
servation, and have endeavoured to excite alarm 
by the array of cases in which it has failed ; but 
the mass of testimony which has been given in 
every quarter of the world, as to its successful ap- 
plication, the rapidity with which it has been dif- 
fused over the four quarters of the globe, and the 
eagerness with which mankind have received a 
blessing of such magnitude, are proofs of its value 
and importance, which neither the selfish incredu- 
lity of professional men, nor the weak delusions of 
the vulgar, can invalidate or overthrow. 

Cumberland felt the loss of his sister so severely 
that it was thought necessary to dissipate his grief 
by change of place and the consolations of tender- 
ness, and he was accordingly removed from Lon- 
don. He returned to his parents; and after a 
short time was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. 
He was then in his fourteenth vear, and the few 
months that remained unexpired of the vacation. 



60 LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 

he carefully employed in prosecuting his studies 
under the superintendance of a Mr. Strong, a gen- 
tleman of much piety, though he was but slenderly 
qualified for the office he had undertaken. 

At Cambridge he was put under the care of the 
Rev. Dr. Morgan, who was an old friend of the 
family, but no friend to his pupil, for he paid little 
attention to his studies, and I suppose less to his 
morals. Morgan, some time after, left the College, 
and his place was supplied by the Rev. Dr. Phil- 
lip Young, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, who 
improved upon the indolence and negligence of 
his predecessor, and did nothing for his disciple. 
" Though he gave me free leave to be idle," says 
Cumberland, " I did not make idleness my 
choice." 

Idleness, I believe, never formed a part of Cum- 
berland's character. Few men have written more; 
few men have written with more uniformity of ex- 
cellence, comparing his own productions with 
each other ; and I have been told by a friend who 
was often in his society, that, when at home, no 
hour was excluded from its application to literary 
labour ; he would rise from his dinner, after a spare 
and temperate repast, and sit down to his desk, un- 
mindful of those who were present, and undis- 
turbed by their conversation. Such systematic 
diligence must have had a remote foundation ; for 
no man acquires new habits of industry at a late 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 6l 

period of life. After a certain age, (thirty in some 
men, and in most men forty,) the general system 
of life is established beyond the power of radical 
or permanent alteration ; slight deviations and 
temporary changes are all that can be expected, 
and all that commonly happen. 

Cumberland was, by his own account, without 
one vice which is formidably opposed to every 
desire or effort after improvement, — the vice of dis- 
sipation. He neither frequented taverns nor bro- 
thels ; he did not waste his hours, impoverish his 
health, nor corrupt his morals, by a criminal indul- 
gence in those excesses which dearly procure for 
a man the appellation of a good friend and compa- 
nion^ because he is too friendly to deny his partici- 
pation in any scene of guilt, and too companion- 
able to court wholesome solitude when his asso- 
ciates are reeling with drunkenness. From such 
commodious pliancy of social feeling, Cumberland 
was happily free, and being free, he had one secu- 
rity for diligence which they must always want 
who attempt to share their hours between study 
and licentiousness, between excesses which debi- 
litate the body and degrade the mind, and honour- 
able toils, which though they may sometimes do 
the one, are certain, at the same time, to ennoble 
the other. To him, therefore, it had been need- 
less to address the monitory sentence, (Vitanda 
est improha Siren desidia,J which the great 
Earl of Chatham desired his nephew " to affix to 



62 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the curtains of his bed, and to the walls of his 
chambers*/' 

It is pleasing to observe by what steps a man of 
genius rises to eminence ; it is pleasing to note the 
progress of his acquirements, the laborious appli- 
cation of his mind, the gradual acquisitions of per- 
manent knowledge, and the successive advances 
in various branches of erudition, by which he 
finally establishes his reputation, and becomes an 
object of enquiry and esteem. These are insights 
into man no less instructive than gratifying: for 
while they shew us how others have become great, 
they teach us the road by which we may attain to 
greatness ourselves. 

During the time that he was at Cambridge, he 
was no very assiduous suitor of the muses. It is 
remarkable, indeed, that at an age when we usu- 
allv write more than we think, and believe our- 
selves capable of all that we wish, he should have 
been so sparing of his labours. It must be allowed, 
however, that his abstinence was commendable : 
for while others waste their hours in fruitless com- 
positions of which they are, in after life, the first tobe 
ashamed, and would be the first to destroy, he was 
patiently storing up materials for future labours, 
more desirous perhaps of solid fame than eager to 

* See Letter III. of those addressed to his nephew, the late Lord Camel- 
ford, and which LordGrenville published a few years since. An invaluable 
bequest from one of the greatest men this country has produced. How lit- 
tle his instructions availed, however, is within the recollection of every 
©ne. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 63 

win the brief laurels which kindness or affectation 
bestows upon immaturity. The only effusion 
which he remembers, or mentions, to have written 
at this period, was some elegiac verses upon the 
death of the Prince of Wales ; and, according to 
his own testimony, " very indifferent ones they 



were/' 



He bestowed great attention upon his Latin de- 
clamations, and accustomed himself so familiarly 
to the use of that language, that when he was ap- 
pointed to keep an act^ he derived an obvious su- 
periority from his proficiency. To effect this pro- 
ficiency, he restricted himself to certain immuta- 
ble hours of study, reserving only six for sleep, 
living chiefly upon a milk diet, and frequently using 
the cold bath. The result of such ardour was 
what may easily be anticipated. In his college 
exercises he was always successful ; and though 
he has narrated the particulars of his triumphs 
with somewhat more egotism than might be 
wished, magnifying the solemnity of the contests, 
the dignity and skill of his antagonists, and the 
anticipated certainty of his defeat, only to exhibit 
his own prowess and superior skill in subduing 
such opponents, yet the reader feels pleased to 
find success the reward of labour, and pardons the 
old man's garrulity with a good-natured smile, 
which more approves than condemns it. 

Another consequence of such severe application 
to his studies, also, was a partial injury to his 



64 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

health, and he was forced to repair to his home, 
there to retrieve a constitution not radically good, 
and now debilitated by an undue employment of 
the mental faculties. He was six months " hover- 
ing between life and death/' suffering beneath the 
attack of a rheumatic fever, and rescued from it 
only by the skilful attentions of his physician, and 
the tender ones of his family. While he was in 
this state he was gratified by hearing, from Cam- 
bridge, of the high station that had been adjudged 
to him, among the wranglers of his year ; and if he 
had any generous emulation of a scholar's renown 
within him, I can believe that this would quicken 
his recovery. 

He now found himself in a station of respectability 
at College, which must have been highly gratify- 
ing to him, earned as it was by a laborious exer- 
cise of his talents ; and the recollection of his suc- 
cess has led him into some reflections upon the 
utility of that kind of academical education, which 
appear to me so just in themselves, and so happily 
expressed, that I cannot prevail upon myself to 
pass them by. 

" I had changed my under-graduate's gown, and 
obtained my degree of bachelor of arts, with ho- 
nours hardly earned by pains the more severe, be- 
cause so long postponed ; and now if I have been 
seemingly too elaborate in tracing my own parti- 
cular progress through these exercises, to which 
the candidate for a decree at Cambridge, must of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 66 

necessity conform, it is not merely because I can 
quote my privilege for my excuse, but because I 
would most earnestly impress upon the attention 
of my reader the extreme usefulness of these aca r 
demical exercises, and the studies appertaining to 
them, by which I consider all the purposes of an 
university education are completed ; and so con- 
vinced am I of this, that I can hardly allow my- 
self to call that an education of which they do not 
make a part; if therefore I am to speak for the dis- 
cipline of the schools, ought I not first to show 
that I am speaking from experience, without 
which opinions pass for nothing? Having there- 
fore first demonstrated what my experience of that 
discipline has been, I have the authority of that, 
as far as it goes, for an opinion in its favour, 
which every observation cf my life has since con- 
tributed to establish and confirm. What more can 
any system of education hold out to those, wh© 
are the objects of it, than public honours to distin- 
guish merit, public exercises to awaken emula- 
tion, and public examinations, which cannot be 
passed without extorting some exertion even from 
the indolent, nor can be avoided without a marked 
disgrace to the compounder/ Now if I have any 
knowledge of the world, any insight into the minds 
and characters of those, whom I have had oppor- 
tunities of knowing, (and few have lived more and 
longer amongst mankind) all my observations tend 
to convince me that there is no profession, no art, 

F 



66 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

no station or condition in life, to which the studies 
I have been speaking of will not apply and come 
in aid with profit and advantage. That mode of 
investigation step by step, which crowns the 
process of the student by the demonstration and 
discovery of positive and mathematical truth, must 
of necessity so exercise and train him in the 
habits of following up his subject, be it what it 
may, and working out his proofs, as cannot fail to 
find their uses, whether he, who has them, dictates 
from the pulpit, argues at the bar, or declaims in 
the senate ; nay, there is no lot, no station, (I 
repeat it with confidence) be it either social or 
sequestered, conspicuous or obscure, professional 
or idly independent, in which the man, once ex- 
ercised in these studies, though he shall afterwards 
neglect them, will not to his comfort experience 
some mental powers and resources, in which their 
influence shall be felt, though the channels, that 
conducted it, may from disuse have become ob- 
scure, and no longer to be traced. 

" Here the crude opinions, that are let loose 
upon society in our table conversations ; mark the 
wild and wandering arguments, that are launched 
at random without ever hitting the mark they 
should be levelled at ; what does all this noise and 
nonsense prove, but that the talker has indeed 
acquired the fluency of words, but never known 
the exercise of thought, or attended to the de- 
velopernentof a single proposition ? Tell him that 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 67 

he ought to hear what may be said on the other 
side of the question — he agrees to it, and either 
begs leave to wind up with a few words more, 
which he winds and wire-draws without end ; or 
having paused to hear, hears with impatience a 
very little, foreknows every thing you had further 
to say, cuts short your argument and bolts in 
upon you« — with an answer to that argument — ? 
No ; with a continuation of his gabble, and, having 
stifled you with the torrent of his trash, places 
your contempt to the credit of his own capacity, 
and foolishly conceives he talks with reason be- 
cause he has not patience to attend to any reason- 
ing but his own. 

" What are all the quirks and quibbles, that 
skirmishers in controversy catch hold of to escape 
the point of any argument, when pressed upon 
them ? If a laugh, a jeer, a hit of mimickry, or 
buffoonery cannot parry the attack, they find 
themselves disarmed of the only weapons they can 
wield, and then, though truth should stare them 
in the face, they will affect not to see it : instead 
of receiving conviction as the acquirement of 
something, which they had not themselves and 
have gained from you 5 they regard it as an insult to 
their understandings, and grow sullen and resentful ; 
they will then tell you they shall leave you to 
your own opinions, they shall say no more, and 
with an air of importance wrap themselves up in a 
kind of contemptuous indifference, when their 

F<? 



6$ LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

reason for saying nothing is only because they 
have nothing more to say. How many of this cast 
of character are to be met with in the world every 
man of the world can witness. 

" There are also others, whose vivacity of ima- 
gination having never felt the trammels of a 
syllogism is for ever flying off into digression 
and display — 

" Quo teneam nodo mutantem Proteaformas .?— 

" To attempt at hedging in these cuckows is 
but lost labour. These gentlemen are very enter- 
taining as long as novelties with no meaning can 
entertain you ; they have a great variety of opi- 
nions, which, if you oppose, they do not de- 
fend, and if you agree with, they desert. Their 
talk is like the wild notes of birds, amongst which 
you shall distinguish some of pleasant tone, but 
out of which you compose no tune or harmony 
of song. These men would have set down 
Archimedes for a fool when he danced for joy at 
the solution of a proposition, and mistaken New- 
ton for a madman, when in the surplice, which he 
put on for chapel over night, he was found the 
next morning in the same place and posture fixed 
in profound meditation on his theory of the pris- 
matic colours. So great is their distaste for demon- 
stration, they think no truth is worth the waiting 
for; the mountain must come to them, they are not 
by half so complaisant as Mahomet. They are not 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 69 

easily reconciled to truisms, but have no particular 
objection to impossibilities. For argument they 
have no ear; it does not touch them ; it fetters 
fancy, and dulls the edge of repartee ; if by chance 
they find themselves in an untenable position, and 
wit is not at hand to help them out of it, they 
will take up with a pun, and ride home upon a 
horse laugh : if they can't keep their ground, they 
won't wait to be attacked and driven out of it. 
Whilst a reasoning man will be picking his way 
out of a dilemma, they, who never reason at all, 
jump over it, and land themselves at once upon 
new ground, where they take an imposing 
attitude, and escape pursuit. Whatever these 
men do, whether they talk, or write, or act, it is 
without deliberation, without consistency, without 
plan. Having no expanse of mind, they can com- 
prehend only in part ; they will promise an epic 
poem, and produce an epigram : in short, they 
glitter, pass away and are forgotten ; their outset 
makes a show of mighty things, they stray out of 
their course into bye-ways and obliquities, and 
when out of sight of their contemporaries, are for 
ever lost to posterity. 

" When characters of this sort come under our 
observation it is easy to discover that their levities 
and frivolities have their source in the errors and 
defects of education, for it is evident they have 
not been trained in any principles of right- 
reasoning. Therefore it is that I hold in such 



70 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

esteem the academical studies pursued at Cam- 
bridge, and regard their exercises in the mathe- 
matical schools, and their examinations in the 
theatre, as forming the best system, which this 
country offers, for the education of its youth. 
Persuaded as I am of this, I must confess I have 
ever considered the election of scholars from the 
college of Eton to that of King's in Cambridge, 
as a bar greatly in their disfavour, forasmuch as by 
the constitution of that college they are not sub- 
jected to the same process for attaining their 
degrees, and of course the study of the mathe- 
matics makes no part of their system, but is 
merely optional. I leave this remark to those, 
who may think it worthy of their consideration. 
Under-graduates of Trinity College, whether 
elected from Westminster or not, have no such 
exemptions." 

Cumberland says, that he was intended for the 
church 4 " the profession of his ancestors/' as he 
terms it, and accordingly his studies chiefly tended 
to such acquirements as the church demands. 

But the misfortune of this period, which he 
chiefly laments, and which every man has cause to 
lament who experiences it, was the want of a 
sagacious director, of one whose own knowledge 
might anticipate the wants of a youthful enquirer, 
and direct his steps into the readiest paths of ac- 
quisition. Without such a guide the student 
wanders in a maze of endless errors and contra- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 71 

dictions ; his labours are often supererogatory, and 
often fruitless : he encumbers his mind with stores 
that have no currency, while he might have accu- 
mulated those which the business of every day 
would call for. There are few situations more 
lamentable than that of an eager mind, ambitious of 
distinction, impatient to attain it, toiling after suc- 
cess, and toiling through unnecessary difficulties. 
Yet such was Cumberland's condition : and though , 
at a late period of his life, he derived some advan- 
tage from the manuscript collections of his college 
years, yet it may be supposed that he would have 
benefited more by a more skilful and judicious 
application of his time and talents at that period. 

Among his wild and impracticable projects, he 
meditated upon a plan of Universal History, and 
after having waded through volumes of abstruse 
and questionable learning, digesting into a common 
place book, numberless facts and reasonings, and 
having discussed topics beyond his strength and 
general system of study, he found, at last, the whole 
undertaking to be useless, because though he knew 
much, he knew not enough to complete what he 
had begun, and was at a loss how to supply his 
deficiencies. The mass of materials which he had 
collected was thrown aside, and the vagrant ex- 
cursions of his mind were directed into other 
channels of study, eventually more profitable to 
him. 



72 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

The Greek tragedians he read with avidity and 
admiration, and from admiring the originals, the 
transition was natural and obvious to correct and 
classical imitations of them. Hence, when 
Mason's Elfrida appeared, he was among those 
who vehemently praised that work. Nor was it 
undeserving of praise. It has not indeed so much 
energy in particular parts as Caractacus, nor is 
there, perhaps, any one of its odes that can be 
compared to that which begins, 

" Hark ! heard ye not yon footsteps dread, 
That shook the earth with thundering tread ? 
'Twas Death I" 

But there is a pleasing vein of poetry which 
pervades the whole drama: the lines are har- 
monious, the thoughts often elevated, and the lan- 
guage select and classical. The action, indeed, 
is barren, nor do any of the characters take great 
hold of the attention, except Elfrida s. Or gar 
is proud, fierce and resentful ; and Edgar merely 
amorous; while Athelwold, of whom the poet 
might have made much, is exhibited as meanly 
subservient, first to his own desires, and then to 
his monarch's licentiousness. These deficiencies 
of character, however, are forgotten when we read 
the poem attentive only to its poetry, which 
always delights. I remember that the late Eliza 
Carter, (whose opinion however upon a question 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 73 

of taste I should hold very lightly, for she pro- 
fessed to judge of a man's capability to write well, 
by the extent of his moral purity), quotes the 
following happy lines from the first ode in Eifrida, 
with great applause : — 

Away, ye Elves away ; 
Shrink at ambrosial morning's living rayj 
That living ray whose pow'r benign, 
Unfolds the scene of glory to our eye 
Where, thron'd in artless majesty, 
The cherub beauty sits on nature's rustic shrine. 

It was the concluding couplet that she par- 
ticularly distinguished, and justly so, for the beauty 
of its thought and the peculiar fecility of its 
expression. 

The introduction of the chorus, however, had 
its plot been formed with the utmost skill and 
nicety, would have effectually precluded it from 
success on the stage. It seems to me the very 
bigotry of learning that would infer, as a necessary 
consequence, that what delighted the Greeks and 
Romans should therefore delight us. The choruses 
to the ancient Greek tragedy, may have a very 
fine effect in perusal, and they may have produced 
certain very powerful sensations of pleasure in the 
audiences for whom they were written : it cannot 
be denied also, that they were instrumental in 
delivering some beautiful effusions, of what their 
modern supporters denominate pure poetry. Yet, 
they certainly destroyed the probability of the 



74? LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

drama, for no man could believe that to be a re- 
presentation of life which exhibited what real life 
never did. 

With respect to an English audience, however, 
the matter has been finally decided. The attempt 
has been made and it has failed : and the question of 
its utility, therefore, and of the propriety of its in- 
troduction is settled for ever. If we write to please, 
we must please by such methods as those who are 
to be pleased will admit: and if a British public have 
pronounced the sentence that discriminates them 
from an Athenian one, it is in vain to inquire why 
they have not Grecian feelings, or how they can 
be taught to admire and approve that which seems 
to have no other claim to practice than its an- 
tiquity. As well might we wonder that a spectacle 
of gladiators has never been produced, or the wild 
licentiousness of a Roman Saturnalia endured. 
National amusements are the produce of accidental 
causes, operating through a long series of ages, 
and assimilated to our feelings by early practice 
and familiarity ; reason has little to do either with 
their production, their continuance, or their decay: 
and he who should attempt to abolish an esta- 
blished and approved mode of pleasure, to be sup- 
plied by one more obviously elegant and more 
agreeable to the faculties of a rational being, would 
soon be convinced of the folly of his undertaking. 

The rules of every art are derived from him who 
first brought it to perfection : but the rules of any 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 75 

art that has been modified from its original plan, 
to suit a different object, must be learned not from 
its inventor, but from those who have successfully 
applied it to a new purpose. It is not by a recurrence 
to first principles that we can then employ it to most 
advanti ge : but by a diligent consideration of its 
present applicability to a specific purpose. Thus it 
is with regard to the drama, which has varied, in 
some particulars, in every country where it has 
been introduced, to adapt it to the manners and 
habits of the people for whom it is providee. 

Till it can be shewn that our own drama may be 
improved by adopting the riming couplets of the 
French, the puerile conceits of the Italian, the ex- 
travagance of the German, or the bombast of the 
Spanish theatre*, I shall still continue to doubt 
whether our taste be deplorably barbarous because 
we do not approve of the chorus of the Greek 
tragedy. 

I am aware that, in delivering these opi Dions* J 
am opposing myself to the practice of Milton, ancl 
Mason, and to the sentiments of many eminent 
men, among whom Dry den himself may be men- 
tioned, who, anticipating the alterations that *such 
an innovation would require in our dramatic eco- 

* I would not be understood to pass a general censure upon the drama 
in either of those countries. He, indeed, who can remember without de- 
light the names of Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Gresset, and Voltaire ; of 
Metastasio and Alfieri ; and of Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, and Iffland, 
must be pitied rather than condemned. In what I have said I have alluded 
rather to peculiar characteristics, than to general ones. 



76 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

nomy, says, " A new theatre, much more ample 
and much deeper, must be made for that purpose ; 
besides the cost of sometimes forty or fifty habits ; 
which is an expense too large to be supplied by a 
company of actors. It is true I should not be 
sorry to see a chorus on a theatre more than as 
large and as deep again as ours, built and adorned 
at a king's charges ; and on that condition, and 
another., which is, that my hands were not bound 
behind me, as they now are, I should not despair 
of making such a tragedy as might be both instruc- 
tive and delightful, according to the mariner of the 
Grecians/' These are authorities, in behalf of a 
practice which no man can despise ; but if his rea- 
son be not convinced, he may be allowed to be in- 
credulous : unless he have the docility of a Catho- 
lic, by which even the superior mind of a Fenelon 
was so hoodwinked, as to deny its own operations, 
when he promised to believe, without conviction, 
certain articles which he was to sign, declaratory 
of his denial of dogmas that had been imputed to 
him. 

Colman, in his capacity as manager of Covent 
Garden theatre, tried how far the aid of scenic 
effect might contribute to the adoption of Elfrida. 
He slightly altered the chorusses, and accommo- 
dated them to stage effect as well as he could ; but 
the piece was coldly received, and soon disconti- 
nued. Mason, who thought that the dignity of 
his muse had been violated by Colman, was very 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 77 

angry, and threatened some exposure to the town. 
But the manager answered his petulant letter, by 
promising to introduce a chorus of Grecian washer- 
women on the stage, and as he had wit, humour, 
and influence enough to perform what he pro- 
mised, the irritated bard was quiet, contenting 
himself w T ith preparing Caractacus for the press, 
some time after, and which had rather a better 
success. 

The piece w T hich Cumberland had admired so 
warmly, he was eager to imitate ; and it is a curi- 
ous coincidence that he adopted the very same 
subject which afterwards occupied the pen of Ma- 
son. This was Caractacus ; but Cumberland's 
disposition of the incidents, man}^ of which were 
fictitious, differed totally from Mason's, with 
whom, as he had no communication at the time, 
there could rest no charge of plagiarism. This 
drama Cumberland never published, though he 
tells us it contained " a good deal of fancy, and 
some strong writing." This is his own testimony, 
and I suppose it may be received with that hesita- 
tion which accompanies our belief of every thins 
an author says in praise of his own works. 



78 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. IV. 

A political Clergyman not a consistent Character. 
— Cumberland appointed Private Secretary to 
Lord Halifax, — Imitates Spenser and Ham- 
mond. — A brief Defence of Hammond from 
the Aspersions of Johnson. — Strange Perversion 
of Taste in Burleigh, Locke, and Gray. — Cum- 
berland enters into Lord Halifax's Family. 

A new scene was now to open upon the views of 
Cumberland. Hitherto, he had passed his life in 
the retirement of a college, and knew little of the 
great world, but as it was reported by books, or as 
it reached his ears, distorted by the prejudices and 
passions of those who moved in it. In the calm 
and placid privacy of academical bowers, his days 
had glided on with imperceptible progress; and the 
stealth of time upon his steps was noticed only by 
the accumulations of knowledge which every hour 
provided. 

A strongly contested election for the county of 
Nottingham took place, between the rival families of 
Knightly and Hanbury, in whose persons the whig 
and tory factions were represented. Cumberland's 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 79 

father had embraced the principles of the former, 
and I hope he was, at least, what is called a consti- 
tutional whig, and not one of those who assume 
the name to cover the darkest purposes. This is 
especially true in the present day, when every des- 
perate knave, who aims at rebellion and subver- 
sion, calls himself a whig, a name which now 
sounds almost synonimous with a rebel and a 
traitor. 

I confess, indeed, it does not correspond with 
my notions of a churchman's duty to find him the 
abetter of political intrigues, or the champion of any 
party. His office is a different one, and if he dis- 
charge it faithfully and conscientiously, he will 
find its duties sufficient for his powers of perform- 
ance, without perverting his faculties to a use no 
longer consistent with his station. I would not 
wish to see a demagogue in the pulpit; nor 
do I contemplate with pleasure an ecclesiastic 
busy in the turbulence of civil factions. To allay 
animosities, not to foment them ; to dissuade from 
strife and contention, not to sanction them by his 
co-operation ; to promote good will, peace, and 
piety, not to witness their opposites as an instiga- 
tor, are his peculiar duty ; and the reverence and 
sanctity which should belong to the office he holds, 
.will surely be despised by others when he shews 
that he despises them himself. It is most un- 
seemly to behold a clergyman, forsaking the peace- 
ful functions of his ministry, to join in the feuds- 



80 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

excesses, and resentments, which ever accompany 
the proceedings of a contested election. 

That the father of Cumberland, however, 
thought differently, we know from his practice, 
and I am not sorry to add, that as his party was 
unsuccessful, his exertions were without the re- 
ward which the consciousness of prosperity would 
have bestowed. But they were not forgotten by 
those for whom they were intended. The Earl of 
Halifax, then high in office, and lord lieutenant of 
the county, was mindful of his support, and made 
him offers, which, as far as they related personally 
to himself, he constantly rejected, but when they 
pointed to the destiny of his son, he lent an ear of 
willing attention, and the future destination of 
Cumberland was connected with the political ser- 
vices of the father. To these arrangements, how- 
ever, the son was less disposed to consent. He 
lamented the separation from peaceful study, to 
endure the toils of a secretary's office, and found 
no compensation in exchanging the charms of 
literature for the dull forms of state affairs. 

When the progress of my labour brings me to the 
mention of Arundel, I shall advert to an opinion 
Strongly fixed in my mind that many of its incidents 
have a connexion with the early life of Cumber- 
land himself. 

While these stipulations for patronage between 
the noble Earl and his reverend supporter were 
carrying on, Cumberland was permitted to visit a 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. SI 

relation in Yorkshire, both for the purpose of 
amending his own health, and that his sister's 
accomplishments in music and dancing might be 
more advantageously pursued. Here he entered 
into some sort of dissipation. He hunted in the 
mornings, danced in the evenings, and having no 
books with him trifled away, I suppose, the inter- 
mediate hours. Among the few volumes which 
he found at his relative's, happened to be Spenser's 
Fairy Queen ; this he sometimes read, and soon 
strove to imitate. He squandered some time in 
unprofitable attempts to adapt the language and 
stanza of Spenser to ideas of his own ; but his 
mother's good sense soon reminded him that he 
was idly wasting hours upon a species of composi- 
tion which, when best done, is seldom read with 
pleasure, and when ill done, is certain to be 
treated with contempt. 

His mind, however, could not remain totally 
inactive. When his taste was rescued from the 
influence of Spenser's verse, he turned to more 
legitimate modes of writing, and being favoured 
w T ith the perusal of a copy of elegiac verses, writ- 
ten by the Lady Susan, daughter of the Earl of 
Galloway, who was then residing at York, with 
his family, he wrote a reply to them, in quatrains. 
The subject of the lady's pen seemed to be taken 
from Hamlet's meditations on the scull of Yorick. 
What they were I cannot tell, for Cumberland did 
not feel himself at liberty to publish them ; but 

G 



82 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

bis own he has, and as they have merit, I will 
transcribe them here. 



" ' True ! We must all be changed by death, 
Such is the form the dead must wear, 
And so, when Beauty yields its breath, 
So shall the fairest face appear. 

But let thy soul survey the grace, 
That yet adorns its frail abode, 
And through the wond'rous fabric trace 
The hand of an unerring God. 

Why does the blood in stated round 
Its vital warmth throughout dispense ? 
Who tun'd the ear to every sound, 
And lent the hand its ready sense ? 

Whence had the eyes that subtle force, 
That languor, they by turns display ? 
Who hung the lips with prompt discourse, 
And tun'd the soft melodious lay ? 

What but thy Maker's image there 
In each external part is seen ? 
But 'tis thy better part to wear 
His image pictur'd best within. 

Else what avail'd the raptur'd strain, 
Did not the mind her aid impart, 
The melting eye would speak in vain, 
Flow'd not its language from the heart. 

The blood, with stated pace, had crept 
Along the dull and sluggish veins, 
The ear insensibly had slept, 
Though angels sung in choicest strains. 

It is that spark of quickning fire, 
To every child of nature giv'n, 
That either kindles wild desire, 
Or lights us on the road to heav'n. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* S3 

That spark, if Virtue keeps it bright, 
And Genius fans it into flame, 
Aspiring mounts, and in its flight, 
Soars far above this earthly frame. 



Strong and expansive in its view, 
It tow'rs amidst the boundless sky, 
Sees planets other orbs pursue, 
Whose systems other suns supply. 

Such Newton was, diffusing far 
His radiant beams ; such Cotes had been. 
This a bright comet ; that a star, 
Which glitter'd, and no more was seen. 

Blush then, if thou hast sense of shame, 
Inglorious, ign'rant, impious slave ! 
Who think'st this heav'n-created frame 
Shall basely perish in the grave, 

False as thou art, dar'st thou suggest 
That thy Creator is unjust ? 
Wilt thou the truth with Him contest, 
Whose wisdom form'd thee of the dust ? 

Say, dotard, hath He idly wrought, 
Or are his works to be believ'd ? 
Speak, is the whole creation nought ? 
Mortal, is God or thou deceiv'd ? 



Thy harden'd spirit, convict at last, 
Its damning error shall perceive, 
Speechless shall hear its sentence past, 
Condemn'd to tremble and believe. 

But thou in reason's sober light 
Death clad with terror can'st survey, 
And from the foul and ghastly sight 
Derive the pure and moral lay. 



G? 



84- LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

Go on, sweet Nymph, and when thy Muse 
Visits the dark and dreary tomh, 
Bright-rob'd Religion shall diffuse 
Her radiance, and dispel the gloom. 



And when the necessary day 

Shall call thee to thy saving God, 

Secure thou'lt chuse that better way, 

Which Conscience points and Saints have trode. 

So shall thy soul at length forsake 
The fairest form e'er soul receiv'd, 
Of those rich blessings to partake, 
Which eye ne'er saw, nor heart conceiv'd. 

There, 'midst the full angelic throng, 
Praise Him, who those rich blessings gave, 
There shall resume the grateful song, 
A joyful victor o'er the grave.' " 



Nor was this the only trifle with which he 
amused his vacant hours at York. He had re- 
nounced Spenser, and adopted Hammond as a 
model to imitate; but the same judicious moni- 
tress who had ridiculed his folly in the former in- 
stance, attacked it in the present ; and so sensible 
was he to her suggestions, that he soon abandoned 
his love master in writing, and took his leave of 
him in the following spritely lines, written almost 
extempore : 

" ' When wise men love they love to folly, 
When blockheads love they're melancholy, 
When coxcombs love, they love for fashion, 
And quaintly call it the belle passion. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 85 

Old bachelors, who wear the" willow, 
May dream of love and hug the pillow, 
Whilst love, in poet's fancy rhyming, 
Sets all the hells of folly chiming. 

But women, charming women, prove 
The sweet varieties of love, 
They can love all, but none too dearly, 
Their husbands too, but not sincerely. 

They'll love a thing, whose outward shape 
Marks him twin brother to an ape ; 
They'll take a miser for his riches, 
And wed a beggar without breeches. 

Marry, as if in love with ruin ? 
A gamester to their sure undoing, 
A drunkard raving, swearing, storming, 
For the dear pleasure of reforming. 

They'll wed a lord, whose breath shall falter 
Whilst he is crawling from the altar : 
What is there women will not do, 
When they love man and money too ?* " 

If the reprehension of his mother extended only 
to the danger of imitation, as a practice which is 
apt to enfeeble the mind, and make it diffident of 
its own powers, I fully accord with the prudence of 
her proceeding, for no imitator has ever risen to 
eminence ; but if she implied, in her disapprobation 
of the practice, any censure of the writer whose 
strains were the object of her son's imitation, I 
should reluctantly believe the testimonies which 
I have mentioned, of her superior capacity and 
taste. No writer in our language has written with 
more tender elegance than Hammond, if a living 



86 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

author perhaps be excepted ; and though it were 
said that his love, his woes, his sighs, and his 
prayers were fictitious ; that he threatened to kill 
himself when he meant to live, and that he sung 
of being in despair when he was perfectly happy 
and contented, it would not therefore follow that 
his imagination was not soft and persuasive, that his 
language was not melodious and appropriate, or 
that his images were not, in the highest degree, 
affecting and pathetic, If praise be denied to 
him, whose topics are imaginary, though his 
descriptions are natural, to whom shall it be 
given ? Poetry is perfect in proportion as it is an 
accurate representation of life, of things that are 
real and probable ; and if it can be shewn, as surely 
it may be shewn, that authors have written upon 
fictitious subjects with a warmth and expression 
which the reality could not have inspired in a 
higher degree, the greatest praise will be due to 
that skill which hides the art by which we are 
made to believe in representations that have no 
foundation but in the poet's fancy. 

Tickell, in his elegy upon the death of Addison, 
has these lines : 

Slow comes the verse that real grief inspires ; 
What mourner ever felt poetic fires ? 

And the question is asked with a plausibility of 
truth which deceives the reader into an assent of 
what is implied by it. But if there be any justice 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. S7 

in the opinion, that what we feel most we can best 
express, I see no reason why the deepest grief 
should not be uttered with the deepest pathos. 
At all events, if neither visionary nor real sorrows 
can be truly depicted ; if the one must be frigid, 
and the other insufficient, where are we to look 
for that which poetry has always been supposed 
capable of giving — a vivid transcript of our feel- 
ings? We must reform our notions of the power 
of language to express the sentiments of the heart, 
and receive words only as tokens of imaginary 
value. 

Johnson, whose mental perception was often as 
defective as his visual one, has attempted to deride 
the plaintive effusions of Hammond'smuse, by talk- 
ing of their pedantry ; but I suppose no reader will 
be disposed to defer very implicitly to his opinions 
upon a question of amatory feeling. The first 
requisite to excellence is to understand the subject 
we are discussing ; and I doubt if Johnson knew 
much of love in its refined state. His was a mind 
formed to embrace the vast, but not to seize the 
minute ; and though he wrote verses which men- 
tioned love in all its languishing sensibility of de- 
sire, I suspect his images were borrowed from 
writers who had been faithful to nature, and whom 
to imitate therefore, could not be to err. What 
his notions of this passion were may be easily 
inferred from various parts of his writings ; espe- 
cially from Rasselas, and his observations upon 



SS LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Pope's Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate 
Young Lady. Yet, it is upon record, that he was 
susceptible of amorous fondness; of a sort of sen- 
sual dalliance, which is quite distinct from love in 
its state of purity. Such lascivious endearments 
have not even the quality of Pope's description of 
lust, which. 

Through some certain strainers well refined, 
Is gentle love that charms all womankind. 

Let us not wonder that such a man should in- 
distinctly comprehend the delicate sentiments of 
a writer like Hammond, or that he should have 
pronounced of his elegies, that they have " neither 
passion, nature, nor manners," which surely he 
could not have done bad he read, or if he read, 
had he been capable of feeling, the beautiful strain 
of thought and expression which peculiarly distin- 
guishes the thirteenth elegy. Is there not nature 
also in the following stanza : 

Let others buy the cold, unloving maid, 

In forc'd embraces act the tyrant's part j 
While I their selfish luxury upbraid, 

And scorn the person, where I doubt the heart. — Elegy II 

May we not believe there is truth in the fol- 
lowing : 

No virgin's easy faith I e'er betray'd, 

My tongue ne'er boasted of a feign'd embrace ; 

No poisons in the cup have I conveyed, 
Nor veil'd destruction with a friendly face. — Elegy IV. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 89 

And is there not passion in these stanzas : 

Ah, gentle door, attend my humble call, 

Nor let thy sounding hinge our thefts betray ; 

So all my curses far from thee shall fall, 
We angry lovers mean not what we say. 

Remember now the fiow'ry wreaths I gave, 

When first I told thee of my bold desires ; 
Nor thou, O Cynthia, fear the watchful slave, 

Venus will favour what herself inspires. 

ft 

She guides the youth who see not where they tread, 

She shews the virgin how to turn the door ; 
Softly to steal from off her silent bed, 

And not a step betray her on the floor. II 

The fearless lover wants no beams of light, 
The robber knows him, nor obstructs his way ; 

Sacred he wanders through the pathless night, 
Belongs to Venus, and can never stray. 

I scorn the chilling winds, and beating rain, 
Nor heed cold watchings o'er the dewy ground ; 

Jf all the hardships I for love sustain, 
With love's victorious joys at last be crown'd. — Elegy V. 

That Johnson should have attempted to degrade 
such poetry as this, may displease, but need not 
excite our surprise, when we recollect that Bur- 
leigh thought Spenser a mere ballad-maker ; that 
Locke regarded Blackmore as the greatest genius, 
except Milton, which this country had produced*, 

* See his correspondence with Mr. Molineux, who says, in a letter to 
Locke, " Mr. Churchill favoured me with the present of Sir Richard 
Blackmore's King Arthur. I had read P. Arthur before, and read it with 
admiration, which is not at all lessened^by this second piece. All our 



90 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

and that Gray, in a letter to Mason, speaks of the 
Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau in terms of ridicule 
and sarcastic contempt. Such are the diversities 
of opinion among mankind ; and so utterly may 
one man differ from the rest of his fellow-creatures 
upon a question of mere taste. 

The reader will pardon this digression, which 
has afforded me an opportunity of attempting the 
vindication of a man whose genius and writings 
deserved to be rescued from the heavy aspersions 
of one whose opinions carry with them an acknow- 
ledged authority. I now return to my narrative. 

When Cumberland returned to Cambridge, the 
opinion of his merits was such, that the master, Dr. 
Smith, and the seniors had agreed upon an altera- 
tion of the existing statutes in his favour, by which 
he might be made eligible to a fellowship with a 
shorter date of standing than was usually required. 
When this plan was communicated to him, he 
had some honourable scruples about him, which 
made him hesitate to admit of an arrangement 
which, by favouring him contrary to established 
rules, must operate to the prejudice of others 
whose regular claims were prior to his. With 
some little sophistry, however, he quieted his 

English poets (Milton excepted) have been mere ballad-makers in compa-> 
rison to him" — To this, Locke replied, " I shall, when I see Sir R. Black- 
more, discourse him as you desire. Thtre is, I with pleasure find, a 
strange harmony throughout, between your thoughts and mine" And, in 
another letter, he says that Sir Richard shews as great strength and pens- 
tration of judgment, as his poetry shews fiights of fancy. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 91 

alarms upon the subject, and had prepared himself 
to receive the full benefit of the proposed kind- 
ness, when he was suddenly called away from all 
his dreams of academical promotion and honours 
to receive others of a political complexion. 

Lord Halifax, in grateful consideration of the 
services which his father had rendered him, 
appointed his son to the station of his lordship's 
private and confidential secretary ; a post highly 
flattering to the views and hopes of a young man, 
as far as human prudence can calculate the proba- 
ble effects of any advancement in life ; but one 
which eventually proved so little beneficial to 
Cumberland that, looking back upon the period, 
he says " had certain passages of his past life been 
then stated to him as probabilities to occur, he 
would have stuck to his college, and endeavoured 
to have trodden in the steps of his ancestors/' He 
represents himself, indeed, as unfit for a state of 
dependence. The truth, perhaps, was, that he 
was solely ambitious of literary distinction, and 
averse from any pursuit that was likely to inter- 
rupt his progress in the career which his fancy had 
marked out. 

Lord Halifax (who was a collateral descendant of 
the celebrated n bleman of that name, the familiar 
companion of wits and poets, and himself no mean 
wit and poet,) was distinguished as a states- 
man, and though he did not add to the literary 
dignity of his ancestor, he did not diminish from 



92 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

It, for he enjoyed the reputation of a good scholar, 
and they who knew him best say he was one. He 
was fond of English poetry, and recited it, says 
Cumberland, " very emphatically after the manner 
of Quin, who had been his master in that art," and 
he had an hereditary fondness for the compositions 
of Prior. He was married to a lady who brought him 
a large fortune, and from whom he took the name 
of Dunk, being made also a freeman of the city of 
London, to entitle him to marry, in conformity to 
the conditions of her father's will. At the time 
when Cumberland entered the family, it consisted 
of Lord and Lady Halifax, three daughters, and an 
elderly clergyman of the name of Crane, who had 
been his lordship's tutor, and had acquired a com- 
plete ascendancy over him. This ascendancy, 
however, he deserved to have, for- he possessed 
sagacity to distinguish what was right, and virtue 
and authority enough to enforce it. His opinions 
were listened to with submissive deference by his 
former pupil ; and as they were never offered un- 
til solicited, their influence was not obstructed by 
that prejudice which is sometimes excited when 
advice is obtruded with too little delicacy and cir- 
cumspection. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 93 



CHAP. V. 

He enters upon the duties of his new office. — -His 
disappointment. — Regrets the calm retirement of 
his College. — Obtains a fellowship. — Discusses 
classical literature with Charles Townsend. — Se- 
neca . — The folly of lavishing indiscriminate praise 
upon all we know. — Bubb Dodington. — His villa 
of La Trappe, and the visitors who frequented 
it. — Cumberland obtains a lay fellowship. 

Cumberland hastened to London to enter upon 
the duties of his new office. Lodgings had been 
provided for him, by his lordship's orders, in 
Downing-street, for the purpose of being near Mr. 
John Pownall, who was then acting-secretary to 
the board of trade, at which it was Lord Halifax's 
office to preside ; and from him it was intended he 
should derive some knowledge of those details of 
business which it was likely he would have to 
transact. Mr. Pownall was a mere man of office, 
and Cumberland was a mere collegian ; two cha- 
racters so opposed to each other, that it was im- 
possible they should meet but to provoke mutual 
disgust. The one was proud to teach what he 
knew ; the other, too proud perhaps to learn what 
he wanted. 



94 LIFE Of CUMBERLAND. 

Cumberland feelingly describes his vexation and 
disappointment at finding himself suddenly re- 
moved from the congenial tranquillity and studious 
solemnity of the university, to move in a sphere 
for which he was as little qualified by inclination 
as by habit. He had quitted a state of society 
which a learned man always finds agreeable, and 
entered upon one which nothing but custom can 
rescue from being disagreeable to an enlarged capa- 
city; he had exchanged the free excursions of an 
enquiring mind, for the precise and unvarying 
avocations of a secretary's desk ; he had forsaken 
companions who could meet his thoughts on any 
topic, who could impart knowledge, and keep the 
faculties in wholesome exercise and activity, for a 
race of mortals very necessary in society, but not 
exactly of such qualifications as an intellectual 
man would prefer in his assosiates. To endure 
such mental banishment patiently was something 
more than could be expected of a young man who 
had not perhaps learned to subdue his fancy to his 
reason, nor had acquired that hardest lesson of our 
moral nature, to find our pleasure in our duty. 
With a mind inflamed by disappointment, there- 
fore, anxiously looking back to what it had lost, 
and impatiently anticipating disgust in what it had, 
let us not wonder that all he saw was odious, and 
that the lapse of fifty years was insufficient to re- 
move the strong impressions of displeasure thus 
excited. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 93 

Something, however, be gained from his situation. 
Being advised to inform himself respecting the 
colonies, he travelled through volumes of useless 
knowledge, which told every thing but what he 
wanted to know ; and though he brought away 
nothing applicable to the immediate object of his 
reading, he remembered various facts and striking 
events, which he afterwards employed as plots for 
tragedies, and other dramatic exhibitions. 

When the recess took place, and statesmen and 
their secretaries retired from the labours of a poli- 
tical campaign, to recruit themselves in the refresh- 
ing bosom of nature, Cumberland accompanied 
his patron into Northamptonshire, and from thence 
went to Cambridge, there to resume operations 
more congenial to him. The hopes of a fellowship 
still amused his imagination, and supported as he 
was by collegiai as well as other interest, he had 
no reasonable grounds to apprehend a failure. 
He was opposed, indeed, by one of the electing 
seniors, and upon very just principles, that his op- 
portunity for success was obtained at the expense 
of justice due to others, who, by such deviatiou 
from established practice, were deprived of their 
only chance of ever obtaining their unquestiona- 
ble rights. This person was Dr. Mason ; and 
when Cumberland waited upon him, as usual, to 
return him thanks, he very honestly replied, 
" You owe me no compliment, for I tell you 
plainly, I opposed your election, not because ] 



96 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

have any personal objection to you, but because 
I am no friend to innovation, and think it hard 
upon the excluded candidates to be subjected on 
a sudden to a regulation, which, according to my 
calculation, gives you two chances to their one, 
and takes away, as it has proved, even that one. 
But you are in ; so there's an end of it, and I give 
you joy." 

Having thus obtained his fellowship, and not 
without a rigorous examination which only a 
well grounded education could have undergone, 
he returned home, to receive the congratula- 
tions of his family, and to repose himself after the 
fatigues of so arduous a contest. His retirement 
was not of long duration, for we find him again 
immersed in the duties of his official station, and 
relieving his mind from its dry and irksome forms, 
by expatiating in the regions of poetry. He wrote 
An Elegy on St. Mark's Eve, a particular period 
of time, when it is believed, by the superstitious, 
that the apparitions of all those who are to die in 
the course of the ensuing year, will be seen walk- 
ing across the churchyard at midnight. But the 
public had no sympathy with so idle a tale, and 
the piece, which Dodsley published, passed 
quietly into that oblivion in which, as the author 
has not drawn it forth, nor I have ever seen it, it 
may be permitted to remain. 

In his capacity as confidential secretary, he had 
some opportunities also for bringing his acquire- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 97 

merits into action. He happened to excite Charles 
Townsend's notice, by solving some kind of 
enigma which required a geometrical process, and 
he rewarded his skill in a manner sufficiently 
flattering to a young and inexperienced youth. 
He put into his hands a report of his own drawing 
up, for he was one of the Lords of Trade, and 
required Cumberland to give his unbiassed opinion 
upon its merits. This, from such a man, so pre- 
eminently gifted, and so qualified to do well what- 
ever he thought fit to do at all, must have been 
flattering to the vanity of Cumberland, though, 
perhaps, the act itself was no more than a piece of 
courtly politeness, which repays a favour by doing 
nothing with the graceful importance which 
belongs to doing much. The youthful secretary 
performed his task with the modest presumption 
of one who wishes to prove himself worthy of a 
trust, and is yet fearful of overstepping the limits 
of decorum. Some things he pointed out that 
might be amended, and many more, no doubt, he 
admired : the objections were politely listened to, 
and the admiration was repaid by compliments ad- 
dressed to his just taste and sagacity. 

The same distinguished character afforded him 
another opportunity of displaying his scholastic 
acquirements. He mentioned the following quo- 
tation, which *he had met with in an anonymous 
writer, who maintained highly impious doctrines : 

Post mortem nihil est, ipsaq ; mors nihil. 

H 



98 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Where this line was to be found he had for- 
gotten, and he referred to Cumberland, as to a 
man fresh from the study of the classics and likely 
to know its author. He recollected it was in one 
of the tragedies of Seneca, and some time after, 
looking through his works, he discovered it in the 
second act of the Troades. He copied it, with 
the context, and sent it to Townsend, accom- 
panied by a poetical version of the passage. As 
the reader may find pleasure both in the original 
and the translation, I will here transcribe them. 

" Verum est, an timidos fabula decipit 
Umbras corporibus vivere conditis ? 
Cum conjux oculis imposuit manum, 
Supremusq ; dies solibus obstitit, 
Et tristes cineres urna coercuit, 
Nonprodest animam traderefuneri, 
Sed restat miseris vivere longius, 
An toti morimur, nullaq; pars manet 
Nostri, cum profugo spiritus halitu 
Immistus nebulis cessit in aera, 
Et nudum tetigit subditafax latus — ? 

Quidquid sol oriens, quidquid et occidens 
JVovit, cosruleis oceanus fretis 
Quidquid vel veniens velfugiens lavat> 
JEtas pegaseo corripiet gradu. 
Quo bissena volant sidera turbine, 
Quo cursu properat secula volvere 
Astrorum dominus, quo properat modo 
Obliquis Hecate currere fiexubus, 
Hoc omnes petimus fata ; necamplias 
Juratos Superis qui tetigit lacus 
Usquam est; ut calidusfumus ab ignibus 
Vanescit, spatium per breve sordidus, 
Ut nubes gravidas , quas modo vidimus, 
Arctoi Borece disjicit impetus, 
Sic hie, quo regimur, spiritus effluet. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 99 

Post mortem nihil est, ipsaq ; mors nihil ; 
Velocis spatii meta novissima. 
Spem ponant avidi, solliciti metum ! 
Quceris quo jaceas post obitum loco-"? 
Quo non nata jacent. 
Tempus nos avidum devorat, et chaos : 
Mors individua est ; noxia corpori, 
Nee parcens animce. Tcenara, et aspero 
Regnum sub domino, Urn en et obsidens 
Castos nonfacili Cerberus ostio, 
Riunores vacui, verbaq ; inania, 
Et par sollicito fabula somnio. 

" Chorus of Trojan Women. 

" * Is it a truth, or fiction all, 

Which only cowards trust, 
Shall the soul live beyond the grave. 

Or mingle with our dust ? 

When the last gleam of parting day 

Our struggling sight hath blest, 
And in the pale array of death 

Our clay-cold limbs are drest. 

Did the kind friend, who clos'd our eyes, 

Speak peace to us in vain ? 
Is there no peace, and have we died 

To live and weep again ? 

Or sigh'd we then our souls away, 

And was that sigh our last, 
Or e'er upon the flaming pile 

Our bare remains were cast ? 

All the sun sees, the ocean laves, 

Kingdoms and kings shall fall, 
Nature and nature's works shall cease, 

And time be lord of all. 

HS 



100 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND 

Swift as the monarch of the skies 

Impels the rolling year, 
Swift as the gliding orb of night 

Pursues her prone career, 

So swift, so sure we all descend 
Down life's continual tide, 

Till in the void of fate profound 
We sink with worlds beside. 

As in the flame's resistless glare 
Th' envelop'd smoke is lost, 

Or as before the driving North 
The scatter'd clouds are tost, 

So this proud vapour shall expire, 

This all-directing soul, 
Nothing is after death ; you've run 

Your race and reach'd the goal. 

Dare not to wish, nor dread to meet 

A life beyond the grave ; 
You'll meet no other life than now 

The unborn ages have. 

Time whelms us in the vast Inane, 
A gulph without a shore ; 

Death gives th' exterminating blow,, 
We fall to rise no more. 

Hell, and its triple-headed guard, 
And Lethe's fabled stream, 

Are tales that lying gossips tell, 
And moon-struck Sybils dream.' " 



It must have occurred to every reader of Cum- 
berland's Memoirs, that he employs, on all occa- 
sions, a commodious kind of praise, a sort of familiar 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 101 

eulogy which he lavishes too unsparingly to be 
always just. If virtues were as common as the 
air we breathe, and vices as rare as a Queen 
Anne' s farthing or a tortoiseshell he-cat, we might 
suppose it a man's ordinary destiny to find, in all 
his friends and acquaintance, qualities of so en- 
gaging a character that only strong encomiastic 
phrases could properly describe them. But while 
the world is what it is ; while human nature con- 
tinues to be compounded of such mixed materials ; 
and while we know that in the purest dispositions 
there will, and must, exist an alloy which only 
weakness can overlook, or hypocrisy deny, it seems 
to argue one or both in him who affects to possess 
a circle of connexions so immaculate, that no vice 
dare enter within its sacred precincts. I know 
the reply to which this censure is exposed, and it 
is one that will always carry with it the appro- 
bation of the unthinking. It will be said, that it 
is amiable and benevolent to dwell upon the bright 
side of human nature, and especially of our friends; 
that we should leave to enemies or strangers the 
office of displaying the dark one ; and that in 
celebrating the good qualities of those we love 
and esteem, we only teach a lesson which we 
secretly hope to find practised towards ourselves. 
These are plausible excuses for the practice, but 
they are no vindication of the principle. Truth is 
immutable, and her authority paramount ; nor 
can we sacrifice her rights to expediency without 



109 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

opening a door to the influx of evils more dreadful 
than may be, at first, imagined. 

Men of strong and discriminating minds are 
usually least disposed to prostitute their praise. 
I need only refer to the names of Pope, Swift, 
Arbuthnot, and Johnson. Their commendations 
were qualified, as every commendation must be 
that is true : or if they applauded only, they ap- 
plauded with such decorum of expression as did 
not exalt its object to a height of blameless purity. 
They knew human nature too well, had too quick 
an insight into her structure and play, and were 
coo deeply conscious of the infirmities of this 
earthly state, to believe any man deserving of that 
ascription of universal excellence which belongs 
to no man. 

I am willing 10 believe that this kind of adu- 
lation is often laudable in its origin ; and I do 
believe that in Cumberland it sprung from -a ge- 
neral benevolence of character which made him 
think men as good as he wished them to be. 
But the effect is, notwithstanding, partly ludicrous 
and partly offensive ; for when we behold names 
unknown till then read of, invested with every 
form of praise which united genius, worth, and 
piety could call forth ; when we behold them in- 
vested with every moral grace, and with every 
mental superiority, we are apt to wonder why 
they were never heard of before, and at last to 
<; aspect that they are heard of now only to be 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 103 

forgotten. We close our minds against the ad- 
mission of truth, because it is forced upon us with 
too little attention to probability ; and as we 
have reason to suspect some things we suspect all. 

Among the friends thus soothed with the 
blandishments of praise is the grandson of Bishop 
Reynolds, who is still living, and who was re- 
motely related to Cumberland by the marriage of 
his ancestor. To this gentleman he addresses a 
mysterious paragraph, at page 168 of the first 
volume of his Memoirs. It seems to hint at a 
transaction of gallantry between Cumberland and 
his friend's sister, but without any mixture of vice. 
What the transaction precisely was I do not 
know. 

About this period he projected an epic poem 5 
which, from the specimen he has given, it might 
be wished he had finished. The subject seems to 
have been the Discovery of India by the Portu- 
guese ; and though this topic has been nobly 
treated by Camoens,* as a national one, it em- 
braces a field wide enough for another adventurer 
to signalise himself in. Why the design was 
laid aside, the author himself does not appear to 

* Why has Miekle's spirited and elegant translation of the Lusiad of 
Camoens languished so long in the public estimation ? Where shall we 
find a more varied strain of poetry, more melody of versification, more 
dignity of language, or more of the enthusiasm of the muse, than in this 
work? Mickle has happily succeeded in combining the respective ex- 
cellencies of the two great masters of English verse ; he has united the 
freedom and variety of Dryden with the terse, harmonious energy of Pope, 



104 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

know : but he regrets that it was not pursued at 
those periods of his life when he had leisure for 
the undertaking. When the reader has perused 
the following fragment, in which the discoveries 
of the Portuguese are introduced, he will 5 perhaps, 
think with me that it is to be regretted he never 
followed up the project to its completion. I 
know nothing of Cumberland's that has more 
poetical merit. 

" Fragment. 

iS Long time had Afric's interposing mound, 

Stretching athwart the navigator's way, 

Fenc'd the rich East, and sent th' advent' rous hark 

Despairing home, or whelm'd her in the waves. 

Gama the first on bold discovery bent, 

With prow still pointing to the further pole, 

Skirted Caffraria till the welcome cape, 

Thence call'd of Hope — but not to Asia's sons-r 

Spoke the long coast exhausted ; still 'twas hope ? 

Not victory ; nature in one effort foil'd, 

Still kept the contest doubtful, aivd enrag'd, 

Itous'd all the elements to war. Meanwhile, 

At once the Titans, with Saturnian Jove, 

So he in happier hour and his bold crew 

Undaunted conflict held : old Ocean storm'd, 

Loud thunder rent the air, the leagued winds. 

R-oar'd in his front, as if all Afric's Gods 

With necromantic spells had charm'd the storm 

To shake him from his course — in vain ; for Fate. 

That grasp'd his helm with unrelenting hand, 

Had register'd his triumph : through the breach 

All Lusitania pour'd ; Arabia mourn'd. 

And saw her spicy caravans return 

Shorn of their wealth , the Adriatic bride 

Like a neglected beauty pin'd away ; 

Europe, which by her hand of late received 

India's rich fruits, from the deserted mart 

Now turn'd aside and pluekt them as they grew 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 105 

" A new-found world from out the waves arose. 
Now Soffaia, and all the swarming coast 
Of fruitful Zanguebar, till where it meets 
The sultry Line, pour'd forth their odorous stores. 
The thirsty West drank deep the luscious draught, 
And reel'd with luxury ; Emmanuel's throne 
Blaz'd with barbaric gems ; aloft he sate 
Encanopied with gold, and circled round 
With warriors and with chiefs in Eastern pomp 
Resplendent with their spoils. Close in the rear 
Of conquest march'd the motley papal host, 
Monks of all colours, brotherhoods and names : 
Frowning they rear'd the cross ; th' affrighted tribes 
Look'd up aghast, and, whilst the cannon's mouth 
Thundcr'd obedience, dropt th' unwilling knee 
In trembling adoration of a God, 
Whom, as by nature tutor'd, in his works 
They saw, and only in his mercy knew. 
But creeds, impos'd by terror, can ensure 
No fixt allegiance, but are strait dismiss'd 
From the vert conscience, when the sword is sheath'd. 
" Now- when the barrier, that so long had stood 

'Twixt the disparted nations, was no more, 

Like fire, once kindled, spreading in its course, 

Onward the mighty conflagration roll'd. 

As if the Atlantic and the Southern seas, 

Driv'n by opposing winds and urg'd amain 

By fierce tornadoes, with their cumbrous weight 

Should on a sudden at the narrowing pass 

Of Darien burst the continental chain 

And whelm together, so the nations rush'd 

Impetuous through the breach, where Gama forc'd 

His desperate passage , terrible the shock, 

From Ormus echoing to the Eastern isles 

Of Java and Sumatra ; India now 

From th' hither Tropic to the Southern Cape 

Show'd to the setting sun a shore of blood : 

In vain her monarchs from a hundred thrones 

Sounded the arbitrary word for war ; 

In vain whole cataracts of dusky slaves 

Pour'd on the coast : earth trembled with the weight : 



106 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

But what can slaves ? What can the nerveless arm, 
Shrunk by that soft emasculating clime, 
What the weak dart against the mailed breast 
Of Europe's martial sons ? On sea, on shore 
Great Almeed triumph'd, and the rival sword 
Of Albuquerque, invincible in arms. 
Wasted the nations, humbling to the yoke 
Kings, whom submissive myriads in the dust 
Prostrate ador'd, and from the solar blaze 
Of majesty retreating veil'd their eyes. 

*' As when a roaming vulture on the wing 
From Mauritania or the cheerless waste 
Of sandy Thibet, by keen hunger prest, 
With eye quick glancing from his airy height 
Haply at utmost need descries a fawn, 
Or kid, disporting in some fruitful vale, 
Down, down at once the greedy felon drops 
With wings close cow'ring in his hollow sides 
Full on the helpless victim ; thence again 
Tow'ring in air he bears his luscious prize, 
And in his native wild enjoys the feast : 
So these forth issuing from the rocky shore 
Of distant Tagus on the quest for gain 
In realms unknown, which feverish fancy paints 
Glittering with gems and gold, range the wide seas, 
Till India's isthmus, rising with the sun 
To their keen sight, her fertile bosom spreads, 
Period and palm of all their labours past ; 
Whereat with avarice and ambition fir'd, 
Eager alike for plunder and for fame, 
Onward they press to spring upon their prey ; 
There every spoil obtain 'd, which greedy haste 
By force or fraud could ravish from the hands 
Of Nature's peaceful sons, again they mount 
Their richly freighted bark ; she, while the cries 
Of widows and of orphans rend the strand, 
Striding the billows, to the venal winds 
Spreads her broad vans, and flies before the gale. 

" Here as by sad necessity I tell 
Of human woes to rend the hearer's heart, 
Truth be my Muse, and thou, my bosom's star, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 107 

The planetary mistress of my birth, 
Parent of all my bliss, of all my pain, 
Inspire me, gentle Pity, and attune 
Thy numbers, heavenly cherub, to my strain ! 
Thou, too, for whom my heart breathes every wish, 
That filial love can form, fairest of isles, 
Albion, attend and deign to hear a son, 
Who for afflicted millions, prostrate slaves 
Beneath oppression's scourge, and waining fast 
By ghastly famine and destructive war, 
No venal 9uit prefers ; so may thy fleets, 
Mistress of commerce, link the Western world 
To thy maternal bosom, chase the sun 
Up to his source, and in the bright display 
Of empire and the liberal search of fame 
Belt the wide globe — but mount, ye guardian waves, 
Stand as a wall before the spoiler's path ! 
Ye stars, your bright intelligence withdraw, 
And darkness cover all, whom lust of gold, 
Fell rapine, and extortion's guilty hope 
Rouse from their native dust to rend the thrones 
Of peaceful princes, and usurp that soil, 
Where late as humble traffickers they sought 
And found a shelter : thus what they obtain'd 
By supplication they extend by force, 
Till in the wantonness of power they grasp 
Whole provinces, where millions are their slaves. 
Ah whither shall I turn to meet the face 
Of love and human kindness in this world, 
On which I now am ent'ring ? Gracious heaven, 
If, as I trust, thou hast bestow'd a sense 
Of thy best gift benevolence on me, 
Oh visit me in merc} r , and preserve 
That spark of thy divinity alive, 
Till time shall end me ! So when all the blasts 
Of malice and unkindness, which my fate 
May have in store, shall vent their rage upon me, 
Feeling, but still forgiving, the assault, 
I may persist with patience to devote 
My life, my love, my labours to mankind/ ' 
* * * 



108 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Somewhere about this time Lord Halifax lost 
his wife, in whom Cumberland also lost a sincere 
and tender friend. She was not of noble birth, 
but she possessed virtues which might have en-, 
nobled any birth. Her advancement to a title 
never elated her mind beyond the due dignity of 
her station ; she knew herself accurately, nor 
wished to act beyond her sphere ; and she studied 
successfully to contribute to her husband's hap- 
piness and welfare, both by her affection and her 
prudence. His grief for her loss was vehement 
and sincere, and his friends regretted her death 
because the calm serenity of her temper had 
always proved an admirable counterpoise to the 
fiery qualities of her lord's. 

The duties of his station called him off from 
unavailing grief however, and Cumberland aN 
tended him to London at the beginning of the 
winter season. His situation with Lord Halifax 
must have been at this time rather nominal than real, 
for he represents himself as passing his time in all 
the solitude of a hermit, devoted only to his books, 
and visited only by one friend of the name of 
Higgs. But that friend could not supply every want 
of his heart. His separations from his family were 
long and frequent ; and accustomed as he had 
been to all the endearing intercourse of a parent's 
roof, he found nothing in the metropolis which 
could supply its loss. Luckily, however, at the 
very moment when these thoughts were acquiring 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 109 

a paramount domination, and were leading him 
to the project of renouncing his post for retirement 
and home, his good and amiable father,j actuated 
by similar impressions, had concluded an exchange 
for his living at Stanwick, with the Rev. Mr. 
Samuel Knight, and, with permission of the Bishop 
of London, took the vicarage of Fulham as an equi- 
valent. Thus the wishes, most ardently enter- 
tained by him, were at once gratified, and his 
situation rendered less irksome, by being compati- 
ble with a nearer and more frequent intercourse 
with his family. 

At this time, Sherlock was Bishop of London, 
but he was in the last stage of bodily decay. Cum- 
berland was occasionally admitted to his presence, 
in company with his father. He found him in a 
state awfully calculated to humble our pride, if 
any thing could humble it, save our own calami- 
ties, and even they cannot always do it. His 
speech was almost unintelligible, and his features 
hideously distorted by the palsy. But his mind 
was entire amid the general wreck of his corporeal 
faculties, for in this state he arranged the last vo- 
lumes of his sermons for publication : nor did the 
selection diminish aught of that high fame which 
his preceding volumes had obtained. 

In the adjoining parish of Hammersmith, lived 
the celebrated Bubb Doclington, at a splendid villa, 
which he fantastically enough denominated La 
Trappe ; an appellation bestowed with as much 



110 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

propriety as if a id an should call Newgate the 
Elysiari Fields. Here he was surrounded by a 
train of needy dependants, artists, authors, and 
physicians, who kept their stations about him by a 
subserviency not always very reputable, I suspect. 
Ralph was one of these : a man noted only for his 
political venality, and as one of the heroes of the 
Dunciad*. Paul Whitehead was another, and 
Dodington would willingly have associated John- 
son with them, as we learn from a curious note 
preserved in Hawkins* life of him ; but Johnson 
declined the honour, and ridiculed him who prof- 
fered it, in one of his Ramblers. 

These, indeed, were not the only visitors at this 
celebrated mansion. Men of virtue and talent 
sometimes assembled there, and diversified a scene 
which else had presented nothing but wealthy ar- 
rogance on one side, and dependent meanness on 
the other. Of these better associates Cumberland 
has given a picture so lively and amusing, that my 
readers will thank me for its transcription here. 
It may be observed, indeed, that Cumberland never 
appears to greater advantage than as the narrator of 
familiar scenes of life. His delineations are so ac- 
curate, and his colouring so vivid, that the picture 
is placed before us with all the strong characters 
of reality. This was a talent which he eminently 
possessed ; and it is, in fact, so nearly allied to 

* Silence, ye wolves ! while Ralph to Cynthia howls, 
And makes night hideous— answer him ye owls. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. Ill 

dramatic composition that we need hardly wonder 
at his felicity in its application. 

"His inmates and fami liars/.' says he, " were 
Mr. Windham, his relation, whom he made his 
heir, Sir William Breton, privy purse to the 
king, and Doctor Thompson, a physician out 
of practice ; these gentlemen formed a very curious 
society of very opposite characters ; in short, it 
was a trio consisting of a misanthrope, a courtier, 
and a quack. Mr. Glover, the author of Leonidas, 
was occasionally a visitor, but not an inmate as 
those above-mentioned. How a man of Doding- 
ton's sort came to single out men of their sort 
(with the exception of Mr. Glover), is hard to say, 
but though his instruments were never in unison, 
he managed to make music out of them all. He 
could make and find amusement in contrasting the 
sullenness of a Grumbletonian with the egregious 
vanity and self-conceit of an antiquated coxcomb, 
and as for the Doctor he was a jack-pudding ready 
to his hand at any time. He was understood to be 
Dodington's body-physician, but I believe he 
cared very little about his patient's health, and his 
patient cared still less about his prescriptions ; and 
when in his capacity of superintendant of his pa- 
tron's dietetics, he cried out one morning at break- 
fast to have the muffins taken away, Dodington 
aptly enough cried out at the same time to the ser- 
vant to take away the raggamuffin, and truth to 
say a more dirty animal than poor Thompson was 



119 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

never seen on the outside of a pigstye ; yet he had 
the plea of poverty and no passion for cold water. 

" It is about a short and pleasant mile from 
this villa to the parsonage house of Fulham, and 
Mr. Dodington having visited us with great polite- 
ness, I became a frequent guest at La Trappe, and 
passed a good deal of my time with him there, in 
London also, and occasionally in Dorsetshire. He 
was certainly one of the most extraordinary men 
of his time, and as I had opportunities of contem- 
plating his character in all its various points of 
view, I trust my readers will not regret that I 
have devoted some pages to the further delineation 
of it. 

" I have before observed, that the nature of my bu- 
siness as private secretary to Lord Halifax, was by no 
means such as to employ any great portion of my 
time, and of course I could devote many hours to 
my own private pursuits without neglecting those 
attendances which were due to my principal. Lord 
Halifax had also removed his abode to Downing- 
street, having quitted his house in Grosvenor- 
square, upon the decease of his lady, so that I 
rarely found it necessary to sleep in town, and 
could divide the rest of my time between Fulham 
and La Trappe. It was likewise entirely corre- 
spondent with Lord Halifax's wishes that I should 
cultivate my acquaintance with Mr. Dodington, 
with whom he not only lived upon intimate terms 
as a friend, but was now in train to form, as it 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 113 

seemed, some opposition connexions ; for at this 
time it happened, Jhat upon a breach with the 
Duke of Newcastle, he threw up his office of First 
Lord of Trade and Plantations, and detached him- 
self from administration. This took place towards 
the latter end of the late king's reign, and the 
ground of the measure was a breach of promise on 
the part of the Duke to give him the seals and a 
seat in the cabinet as Secretary of State for the 
colonies. 

" In the summer of this year, being now an ex- 
•secretary of an ex-statesman, I went to Eastbury, 
the seat of Mr. Dodington, in Dorsetshire, and 
passed the whole time of his stay in that place. 
LordHalifax with his brother-in-law Col. Johnstone 
of the Blues, paid a visit there, and the Countess 
Dowager of Stafford, and old Lady Hervey, were 
resident with us the whole time. Our splendid 
host was excelled by no man in doing the honours 
of his honse and table ; to the ladies he had all 
the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard, 
with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman towards 
the men. His mansion w r as magnificent, massy, 
and stretching out to a great extent of front, with 
an enormous portico of Doric columns, ascended 
by a stately flight of steps ; there were turrets and 
wings that went I know not whither, though now 
they are levelled with the ground, and gone to 
more ignoble uses: Vanbrugh, who constructed 
this superb edifice, seemed to have had the plan of 

I 



114 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Blenheim in his thoughts, and the interior was as 
proud and splendid as the exterior was bold and 
imposing. All this was exactly in unison with 
the taste of its magnificent owner, who had gilt 
and lurnished the apartments with a profusion of 
finery that kept no terms with simplicity, and not 
always with elegance or harmony of style. What- 
ever Mr. Doding ton's revenue then was } he had 
the happy art of managing it with that regularity 
and economy, that I believe he made more display 
at less cost than any man in the kingdom but him- 
self could have done. His town house in Pall- 
Mail, his villa at Hammersmith, and the mansion 
above described, were such establishments as few 
nobles in the nation were possessed of. In either 
of these he was not to be approached but through 
a suite of apartments, and rarely seated but under 
painted ceilings and gilt entablatures. In his villa 
you were conducted through two rows of antique 
marble statues, ranged in a gallery floored with 
the rarest marbles, and enriched with columns of 
granite and lapis lazuli; his saloon was hung with 
the finest Gobelin tapestry, and he slept in a bed 
encanopied with peacocks' feathers, in the style of 
Mrs. Montague. When he passed from Pall-Mail 
to La Trappe, it was always in a coach, which I 
could suspect had been his ambassadorial equipage 
at Madrid, drawn by six fat unwieldy black horses, 
short docked, and of colossal dignity; neither w T as 
he less characteristic in apparel than in equipage ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. \\5 

he had a wardrobe loaded with rich and flaring 
suits, each in itself a load to the wearer, and of 
these, I have no doubt, but many were coeval 
with his embassy above-mentioned, and every 
birth-day had added to the stock. In doing this 
he so contrived as never to put his old dresses out 
of countenance by any variations in the fashion of 
the new ; in the mean time his bulk and corpu- 
lency gave full display to a vast expanse and pro- 
fusion of brocade and embroidery, and this, when 
set off with an enormous tye-perriwig and deep- 
laced ruffles, gave the picture of an ancient cour- 
tier in his gala habit, or Quin in his stage dress ; 
nevertheless it must be confessed this style, 
though out of date, was not out of character, but 
harmonised so well with the person of the wearer, 
that I remember when he made his first speech in 
the House of Peers, as Lord Melcombe, all the 
flashes of his wit, all the studied phrases and well- 
turned periods of his rhetoric, lost their effect, sim- 
ply because the orator had laid aside his magiste- 
rial tye, and put on a modern bag wig, which was 
as much out of costume, upon the broad expanse 
of his shoulders, as a cue would have been upon 
the robes of the Lord Chief Justice. 

" Having thus dilated more than perhaps I 
should have done upon this distinguished person's 
passion for magnificence and display, when I. pro- 
ceed to enquire into those principles of good taste, 
which should naturally have been the accompani- 

12 



116 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

merits and directors of that magnificence, I fear I 
must be compelled by truth to admit, that in these 
he was deficient. Of pictures he seemed to take 
his estimate only by their cost ; in fact he was not 
possessed of any ; but I recollect his saying to me 
one day, in his great saloon at Eastbury, that if he 
had half a score pictures of a thousand pounds 
apiece, he would gladly decorate his walls with 
them, in place of which, I am sorry to say, he had 
stuck up immense patches of gilt leather, shaped 
into bugle horns, upon hangings of rich crimson 
velvet ; and round his state bed he displayed a 
carpeting of gold and silver embroidery, which too 
glaringly betrayed its derivation from coat, waist- 
coat, and breeches, by the testimony of pockets, 
button-holes, and loops, with other equally incon- 
trovertible witnesses, subpoena* d from the tailor's 
shopboard. When he paid his court at St. James's, 
to the present queen, upon her nuptials, he ap- 
proached to kiss her hand, decked in an embroi- 
dered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches, 
the latter of which, in the act of kneeling down, 
forgot their duty, and broke loose from their moor- 
ings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner. 

" In the higher provinces of taste we may con- 
template his character with more pleasure, for he 
had an ornamented fancy and a brilliant wit. He 
was an elegant Latin classic, and well versed in 
history, ancient and modern. — His favourite prose 
writer was Tacitus, and I scarce ever surprised him 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 117 

in his hours of reading, without finding that au- 
thor upon his table before him. He understood 
him well, and descanted upon him very agreeably, 
and with much critical acumen. Mr. Dodington 
was in nothing more remarkable than in ready per- 
spicuity and clear discernment of a subject thrown 
before him on a sudden ; take his first thoughts 
then, and he would charm you ; give him time to 
ponder and refine, you would perceive the spirit of 
his sentiments, and the vigour of his genius, eva- 
porate by the process ; for though his first view of 
the question would be a wide one and clear withal, 
when he came to exercise the subtlety of his dis- 
quisitorial powers upon it, he would so ingeni- 
ously dissect and break it into fractions, that as an 
object, when looked upon too intently for a length 
of time, grows misty and confused, so would the 
question under his discussion, when the humour 
took him to be hyper-critical. Hence it was that 
his impromptu's in parliament were generally more 
admired than his studied speeches, and his first 
suggestions in the councils of his party better 
attended to than his prepared opinions. 

" Being a man of humble birth, he seemed to 
have an innate respect for titles, and none bowed 
with more devotion to the robes and fasces of high 
rank and office. He was decidedly aristocratic : 
he paid his court to Walpole in panegyric poems, 
apologising for his presumption by reminding him, 
that it was better to be pelted with roses than with 



IIS LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

rotten eggs : to Chesterfield, to Wilmington, Pul- 
teney, Fox, and the luminaries of his early time, 
he offered up the oblations of his genius, and in- 
censed them with all the odours of his wit: in his 
latter days, and within the period of my acquaint- 
ance with him, the Earl of Bute, in the plenitude 
of his power, was the god of his idolatry. That 
noble lord was himself too much a man of letters, 
and a patron of the sciences, to overlook a witty 
head, that bowed so low, he accordingly put a co- 
ronet upon it, which, like the barren sceptre in the 
hand of Macbeth, merely served as a ticket for the 
coronation procession, and having nothing else to 
leave to posterity in memory of its owner, left its 
mark upon the lid of his coffin. 

'■' During my stay at Eastbury, we were visited 
by the late Mr. Henry Fox and Mr. Alderman 
Beckford ; the solid good sense of the former, 
and the dashing loquacity of the latter, formed a 
striking contrast between the characters of these 
gentlemen. To Mr. Fox our host paid all that 
courtly homage, which he so well knew how to 
time, and where to apply ; to Beckford he did not 
observe the same attentions, but in the happiest 
flow of his raillery and wit, combated this intrepid 
talker with admirable effect. It was an interlude 
truly comic and amusing. Beckford loud, voluble, 
self-sufficient, and galled by hits, which he could 
not parry, and probably did not expect, laid him- 
self more and more open in the vehemence of his 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 119 

argument ; Dodington, lolling in his chair, in per- 
fect apathy and self-command, dosing and even 
snoring at intervals in his legarthic way, broke 
out every now and then into such gleams and 
flashes of wit and irony, as by the contrast of his 
phlegm with the other's impetuosity, made his 
humour irresistible, and set the table in a roar. 
He was here upon his very strongest ground, for 
no man was better calculated to exemplify how 
true the observation is — 

Ridiculum acri 
Fortius ac melius — 

" At the same time he had his serious hours and 
graver topics, which he would handle with all due 
solemnity of thought and language, and these were 
to me some of the most pleasing hours I have 
passed with him, for he could keep close to his 
point, if he would, and could be not less argumen- 
tative than he was eloquent, when the question 
was of magnitude enough to interest him. It is 
with singular satisfaction, I can truly say, that I 
never knew him flippant upon sacred subjects. 
He was however generally courted and admired as 
a gay companion rather than as a grave one. 

" I have said that the dowager Ladies Stafford 
and Hervey made part of our domestic society, 
and as the trivial amusement of cards was never 
resorted to in Mr. Dodington's house, it was his 
custom in the evenings to entertain his company 



120 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

with reading, and in this art he excelled ; his selec- 
tions, however, were curious, for he treated these 
ladies with the whole of Fielding's Jonathan Wild, 
in which he certainly consulted his own turn for 
irony, rather than their' s for elegance, but he set 
it off with much humour, after his manner, and 
they were polite enough to be pleased, orat least 
to appear as if they were. 

# His readings from Shakspeare were altogether 
as whimsical, for he chose his passages only where 
buffoonery was the character of the scene ; one of 
these, I remember, was that of the clown, who 
brings the asp to Cleopatra. He had, however, a 
manuscript copy of Glover's Medea, which he 
gave us con amore, for he was extremely warm iij 
his praises of that classical drama, which Mrs. 
Yates afterwards brought upon the stage, and 
played in it with her accustomed excellence ; he 
did me also the honour to devote an evening to 
the reading of some lines, which I had hastily 
written, to the amount of about four hundred, 
partly complimentary to him as my host, and in 
part consolatory to Lord Halifax, upon the event 
of his retiring from public office; they flattered 
the politics then in favour with Mr. Dodington, 
and coincided with his wishes for detaching Lord 
Halifax from the administration of the Duke of 
Newcastle. I was not present, as may well be 
conceived, at this reading, but I confess, I sate 
listening in the next room, and was not a little 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 121 

gratified by what I overheard. Of this manuscript 
I have long since destroyed the only copy that I 
had, and if I had it now in my hands it would be 
only to consign it to the flames, for it was of that 
occasional class of poems for the day, which have 
no claim upon posterity,and in such I have not been 
ambitious to concern myself; it served the pur- 
pose, however, and amused the moment ; it was 
also the tribute of my mite to the lares of that man- 
sion, where the muse of Young had dictated his 
tragedy of The Revenge, and which the genius of 
Voltaire had honoured with a visit; here Glover 
had courted inspiration, and Thomson caught it : 
Dodington also himself had a lyre, but he had 
hung it up, and it was never very high-sounding ; 
yet he was something more than a mere admirer 
of the muse. He wrote small poems with great 
pains, and elaborate letters with much terse- 
ness of style, and some quaintness of expression : 
I have seen him refer to a volume of his own 
verses, in manuscript, but he was very shy, and I 
never had the perusal of it. I was rather better 
acquainted with his diary, which, since his death, 
has been published, and I well remember the 
temporary disgust he seemed to take, when upon 
his asking what I would do with it, should he be- 
queath it to my discretion, I instantly replied, 
that I would destroy it. There was a third, which 
I more coveted a sight of than of either of the 
above, as it contained a miscellaneous collection 



122 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

of anecdotes, repartees, good sayings, and humor- 
ous incidents, of which he was part author and 
part compiler, and out of which he was in the 
habit of refreshing his memory, when he prepared 
himself to expect certain men of wit and pleasantry, 
either at his own house or elsewhere. Upon this 
practice, which he did not affect to conceal, he 
observed to me one day, that it was a compliment 
he paid to society, when he submitted to steal 
weapons out of his own armoury for their enter- 
tainment, and ingenuously added, that although 
his memory was not in general so correct as it had 
been, yet he trusted it would save him from the 
disgrace of repeating the same story to the same 
hearers, or foisting it into conversation in the 
wrong place, or out of time. No man had fewer 
oversights of that sort to answer for, and fewer still 
were the men, whose social talents could be com- 
pared with those of Mr. Dodington." 

This is a copious extract ; but surely no reader 
will think it a tedious one. 

Academical remunerations were still to be 
showered upon Cumberland. When he returned 
out of Dorsetshire, he was solicited to offer him- 
self as a candidate for the lay fellowship, then va- 
cant by the death of Mr.Titley, the Danish envoy. 
As there are but two fellowships of this descrip- 
tion, it may be supposed that many sought it who 
were disappointed. Cumberland tried and gained 
it ; he was supported by the same powerful in- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 123 

terest as before, and where there -is patronage as 
well as merit, it is natural to expect success. It 
does not appear that any undue influence was em- 
ployed, or any positive enactments dispensed with 
in his favour ; but he did not hold the possession 
long, for he soon entered into that state which 
effectually disqualified him for retaining his fellow- 
ship, by qualifying him for holding a station much 
more honourable and useful, that of a husband and 
a father of a family. 



12i LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. VL 



Cumberland writes The Banishment of Cicero, — 
Complimentary Letter from War bur ton. — The 
mutual Civilities of Authors commonly ridicu- 
lous, — Offered to Garrick by Lord Halifax ', for 
Representation, but refused, — Cumberland mar- 
ries, — Accompanies Lord Halifax to Ir eland y 
who is appointed Lord Lieutenant, — His Duties, 
— Offered a Baronetcy, but refuses it. — Sketch 
of Society in Dublin. — Cumberland* s Father 
promoted to the See of Clonfert, 

We have now arrived at the period when Cumr 
berland made his first appearance before the pub- 
lic as a d amatic writer. The subject which he 
chose for his virgin effort was one very little cal r 
culated to mould into the requisite form for repre- 
sentation, though sufficiently tempting perhaps to 
a scholar. Its title (The Banishment of Cicero) 
will tell what that subject was. Such an action 
might afford scope for the production of a fine clas- 
sical drama, replete with elevated sentiments, en- 
forced in a style of chaste and dignified eloquence; 
but it could not comprise such incidents as a mo- 
dern audience would receive with applause. This 
defect the author very justly allows, but he insi- 
nuates, at the same time, that if he did not pro- 
duce a good acting play, he at least produced a good 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 125 

reading one. This opinion he thinks deducible 
from the approbation bestowed upon it, both in 
England and Ireland, by competent judges, and 
among others, by Bishop Warburton, a compli- 
mentary letter from whom to Cumberland, is pre- 
served in the Memoirs ; but there are few testimo- 
nies less to be depended upon than those which 
an author's friends deliver; especially when a 
work is politely presented, and an opinion politely 
requested. What can be expected but one po- 
litely given ? Politeness and truth, however, are 
not inseparable companions. It cannot be ex- 
pected, indeed, that a man's love of integrity will 
be so paramount to all other feelings, that he 
would recompence an author's civility who had 
presented him with a copy of his work, by telling 
him that it was a worthless production. There is 
an allowable evasion of truth in these cases, which 
all men practise, and all men know to be practised, 
except when they are its objects, and then it is no 
longer truth evaded but truth herself. Hence the 
w 7 ide difference between the public sentence upon 
a book, and that which we often find in the letters 
of eminent judges addressed to the authors them- 
selves ; and hence the mutual compliments of lite- 
rary men which commonly appear so ludicrous 
when divested of those accidental circumstances 
by which, in their first application, they are ren- 
dered respectable. ' 
" Let me thank you," says Warburton, " for 
the sight of a very fine dramatic poem. It is much 



126 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

too good for a prostitute stage." What is this 
but common civility in the first place, and com- 
mon cant in the second ? That the poem would 
be very fine might be anticipated ; as much is al- 
ways said on similar occasions. That the stage 
was a prostitute one, is no more than what every age 
says of itself. Nothing is good but what is gone, 
and that which is gone was bad while it was pre- 
sent. This is the accustomed jargon of each gene- 
ration. And where then can we look for a period of 
acknowledged and evident virtue, by a comparison 
with which we may estimate the degree of subse- 
quent degeneracy ? Not in the testimonies of 
those who lived in that period, but in that of those 
who lived after it. This is like a child who be« 
wails the bauble that is destroyed, and neglects 
the one it possesses, only because the one cannot 
be had, and the other can. To such puerility it 
might be expected Warburton would have been 
superior; but the prejudice was a vehicle for 
praise, and he could play the courtly panegyrist 
with admirable dexterity, as every reader will ac- 
knowledge who remembers the adulatory corre- 
spondence between himself and Bishop Hurd, 
lately published. Prelatical courtesy is there car- 
ried to its height ; and to a height which no one 
can contemplate with much pleasure. 

Though the drama of Cumberland wa» printed, 
it has never happened to fall under my notice ; nor 
could I obtain it any where upon recent inquiry. 
What are its claims, therefore, to the applause 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 127 

which the author demands for it, I know not ; but 
if I am to form my judgment of the whole from 
the specimens presented by Cumberland, I should 
hesitate to believe that it was either ajine drama- 
tic poem, or too good for any stage, prostitute or 
chaste. The dialogue, in these extracts, is too 
tame, and the language too feebly correct. Whe- 
ther I am wrong in forming this opinion let the 
reader judge from the same evidence as I have 
had. 



" Gab. — Cato is still severe, is still himself: 

Rough and unshaken in his squalid garb, 
He told us he had long in anguish mourn'd, 
Not in a private but the public cause, 
Not for the wrong of one, but wrong of all, 
Of Liberty, of Virtue, and of Rome. 

" Clod.-— "No more : I sleep o'er Cato's drowsy theme. 

He is the senate's drone, and dreams of liberty, 
When Rome's vast empire is set up to sale, 
And portion'd out to each ambitious bidder 
In marketable lots " 

66 In the further progress of the same scene Pom- 
pey is mentioned, and Calphurnius Fiso intro- 
duced in the following terms : — - 

" Gal?. Oh ! who shall attempt to read 

In Pompey's face the movements of his heart ? 
The same calm artificial look of state, 
His half-clos'd eyes in self-attention wrapt, 
Serve him alike to mask unseemly joy, 
Or hide the pangs of envy and revenge. 

" Clod.—- See, yonder your old colleague Piso comes ! 
But name hypocrisy and he appears. 



128 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

How like his grandsire's monument he looks J 

He wears the dress of holy Numa's days, 

The hrow and beard of Zeno ; trace him home, . 

You'll find his house the school of vice and lusty 

The foulest sink of Epicurus' sty, 

And him the rankest swine of all the herd." 

" I find the two first acts are wound up with 
some couplets, in rhyme, after the manner of the 
middle age. It will, I hope, be pardonable, if I 
here insert the lines with which Clodius concludes 
the first act — 

" When flaming comets vex our frighted sphere, 
Though now the nations melt with awful fear, 
From the dread omen fatal ills presage, 
Dire plague and famine and war's wasting rage ; 
In time some brighter genius may arise, 
And banish signs and omens from the skies, 
Expound the comet's nature and its cause, 
Assign its periods and prescribe its laws, 
Whilst man grown wise, with his discoveries fraught, 
Shall wonder how he needed to be taught." 

This play Lord Halifax, who requested a peru- 
sal of it, undertook to present to Garrick, using 
all his influence with him to obtain its representa- 
tion. Cumberland accompanied his lordship to 
the manager, and heard the strong recommenda- 
tion of his patron ; but he read, in the countenance 
of Garrick, the fate of his drama. It was left with 
him for his opinion ; that opinion was given a day 
or two afterwards, and confirmed the predictions 
of the author. He bore his disappointment unre- 
pining; but his lordship, who probably thought 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 199 

his avowed protection of the writer a sufficient tes- 
timony of his merits, felt so indignant at the re- 
jection, that he suspended for some time his usual 
intercourse with Garrick. Cumberland candidly 
adds, " when I published this play I was consci- 
ous that I published Mr. Garrick's justification 
for refusing it ;" with so much more prudence did 
the author contemplate the transaction than the 
peer. 

In the 201st page of his Memoirs, Cumberland 
expatiates upon the difficulty of his undertaking, 
and reviews his qualifications for the task of deli- 
neating himself. Among those which he consi- 
ders necessary to his purpose, he reckons some 
which, had he possessed them, no one would be 
pleased with their exertion. He deprecates the 
idea of merely recording the respective dates of 
his several productions, and aspires to the office of 
a censor over himself, vainly supposing that he 
could " act as honestly and conscientiously in his 
own case as he would in the instance of another 
person," and " resolving not to speak partially of 
his own works, because they are his own." Here 
is an assumption of power which no one would 
believe him to possess, had he really possessed it, 
or were it possible for any one to possess it. His 
praise would be ascribed to partiality, his censure 
to affectation ; and so little are mankind accus- 
tomed to confide in the accuracy of opinions 
which a man entertains of himself, that their 

K 



130 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

notions of things would receive no modification 
from such an authority, nor would they be pre- 
vented from forming_their own decisions respect- 
ing him and/his actions. The candour and truth, 
therefore, which Cumberland wished to employ, 
Would nave answered no ultimate purpose satis- 
factory to himself; and he would have done better 
by aiming only at that neutrality of opinion which 
leans to neither side, but simply states the evi- 
dence with regard to a particular circumstance, 
without urging its application to any specific 
inference. 

In the year 17-59, Cumberland resigned his fel- 
lowship for a wife, an exchange of very dubious 
benefit, and which some men have made without 
finding the equivalent of what they resigned. The 
lady whom he married, was Elizabeth, the only 
daughter of George Ridge, Esq. an intimate friend 
of his father's and a gentleman at whose house he 
had passed many happy and social hours before he 
probably ever thought of connecting himself so 
tenderly with the destiny of one of its inmates. 
He pays an affectionate, and I doubt not a sincere, 
testimony to her virtues, and of course celebrates 
her personal attractions. They lived happily to- 
gether for many years, though 1 have been told, by 
a friend who was likely to be well informed, that 
his wife's love for him was sometimes displayed 
with too little attention to his liberty, and that her 
desire of having him always in her presence, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 131 

especially during her last illness, amounted to a 
virtual prohibition of his seeing any person who 
did not come home to him. This is a degree of 
fondness very pleasing perhaps to her who exer- 
cises it, but seldom acceptable, I suspect, to him 
who is its object. 

In 1760 the king's death caused, as usual, some 
political changes, and among others Lord Halifax 
was promoted to the important post of Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, a post which demands a 
more than ordinary union of prudence, activity, 
and wisdom. Every great man, when he is ap- 
pointed to any station to which extensive patron- 
age is annexed, is soon overwhelmed with applica- 
tions for what he has to give ; some expect the re- 
ward of past services, some the performance of past 
promises, and some the meed of acknowledged ta- 
lents and worth: the difficulties of the giver are 
increased, by the contending claims of the appli- 
cants, and he is embarrassed to discover, not where 
he can confer a benefit but how he can avoid in- 
flicting a disappointment. Cumberland, being im- 
mediately about the person of Lord Halifax, was 
not unmindful of his own friends and relatives; 
and he enumerates some instances wherein he 
availed himself of his influence to communicate 
good fortune to others. His father went out with 
the new Lord Lieutenant as one of his chaplains. 

Lord Halifax was accompanied by Gerard Ha- 
milton, as chief secretary. This gentleman, (well 

1(2 



132 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

known as the associate of Johnson and his literary 
circle, as well as by the quaint appellation of 
" single speech Hamilton,") was not chosen to that 
office by his employer, but appointed to it by his 
political friends, and it might be expected, there- 
fore, that he would enjoy no more of the confi- 
dence of Lord Halifax than was necessarily con- 
nected with the business they had to transact in 
common. All that could be subtracted from this 
ordinary detail of affairs was reserved for the pri- 
vate ear of Cumberland, and to him was entrusted 
the management of his lordship's most important 
personal concerns. With the title and rank of 
Ulster secretary only, he possessed the privileges, 
and perhaps the toils without the emoluments, of 
chief. Transactions which had no right to pass 
under his notice were committed to him, and his 
situation was rendered delicate, responsible, and 
in some measure, dangerous. He had the entire 
control over his lordship's finances, and, as they by 
no means flourished, and his lordship, succeeding 
the Duke of Bedford, was resolved not to shine 
less than his predecessor, he found the task one 
which required no small exertion and skill to 
maintain the dignity of the vice regal court, with- 
out exhausting the funds that were to support it. 

He had leisure, however, from these intricate 
and laborious duties, to observe that George 
Faulkner had pirated his Banishment of Cicero, 
(which he had published in London, " upon quar- 



i 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 133 

to paper, in a handsome type,") and sold it for 
sixpence ! The anxieties of the author were thus 
obtruding upon the cares of the secretary ; though 
he seems to have indulged in a philosophical apathy 
at this period, respecting his literary success,which 
I am afraid he soon afterwards lost, for he gave to 
the world a poem upon the accession of the new 
king, and never enquired what was its fate among 
readers or critics. I suppose it was a quiet one, 
or the rumour of a contrary destiny would have 
reached him in the midst of his indifference. 

It will not be necessary to dwell at much length 
upon the events which happened during his resi- 
dence in Ireland. Lord Halifax discharged his 
trust in a manner that satisfied both those whom 
he governed, and those for whom he governed. 
His speech, upon opening the session, was ad- 
mired for its excellence, a great part of which, Cum- 
berland insinuates, was communicated to it from 
the pen of Gerard Hamilton ; and from what he 
observed on this occasion he w r as led to a hasty 
belief that Hamilton might be the author of Junius' 
Letters, because there was a great similarity be- 
tween his style and that of Junius: a very vague 
foundation for his opinion, which, however, he 
does not seem to embrace with much ardour. 

One thing deserves to be mentioned, as it re- 
dounds highly to the honour of Lord Halifax. It 
was during his government that the vote was passed 
for augmenting the revenue of the Lord Lieute- 



134 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

nant, and though he accepted and passed it in 
favour of his successors, he peremptorily rejected 
it for himself. This is an instance of disinterested 
conduct very rare in men who have opportunities 
of increasing their wealth ; and it was peculiarly 
noble in Lord Halifax, for he had actually dis- 
bursed sums considerably greater than his revenue, 
which then amounted to not more than twelve 
thousand pounds a year. It endeared him also to 
the Irish nation, who beheld his departure with 
regret, and put up prayers for his return, while 
they distinguished his retirement from office by 
every token of respect and admiration which gra- 
titude and esteem could devise. 

Let me not, however, forget the moderation of 
Cumberland in celebrating that of his patron. The 
fidelity and zeal with which he had discharged the 
customary duties of his station, and some supere- 
rogatory ones, called upon Lord Halifax for a 
more specific notice of them than what belonged 
to their simple remuneration ; especially as that 
remuneration had not been increased by any of 
those arts of aggrandisement which are too often 
put in practice. Cumberland had a mind which 
disdained to derive any advantages from disho- 
nourable practices ; preferring a moderate compe- 
tency, with an unspotted conscience, to flattering 
gains, with a reproaching one. This degree of 
virtue could not pass unnoticed by a man so capa- 
ble of practising a similar greatness of conduct ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 135 

and as an honorary gratification for so much purity 
of action he offered to obtain for him the rank of a 
baronet. But rank, without a fortune to invest it 
with due splendour, is an object of very little 
respect in modern times, when money is the test 
by which every man's claims to notice are finally 
adjusted. His lordship felt, indeed, that a barren 
title, unaccompanied by that which should give it 
weight and efficacy, was but what Montesquieu 
denominates " money of opinion/' a sort of cheap 
reward which kings bestow for services without 
exhausting their treasuries. He hinted, therefore, 
that his father would probably obtain a bishopric, 
and that he possessed, besides, a competent estate, 
which would descend to him. These, perhaps, 
were reasons why a man might accept a title, but 
not why a title should be offered to him ; and it is 
something like mockery torecompence services by 
the gift of an empty name without any of those 
substantial rewards which make life happier by 
making it independent. 

Cumberland, indeed, viewed the proffered ho- 
nour just in this light. He required, however, 
some time*o meditate upon it, that he might con- 
sult his family. Their sense of it coincided with 
his own, and he accordingly intimated his respect- 
ful refusal of the intended dignity. How far it had 
been prudent to have accepted it as an earnest of 
future favours, and as a means of conciliating those 
from whom such favours were to be expected, is 



136 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

another question ; and a question easily answered , 
perhaps, for Lord Halifax considered the refusal as 
a tacit renunciation of his patronage. Not that 
he withdrew his countenance immediately: but 
Cumberland seems to regard it as one of those 
circumstances which ultimately led to conse- 
quences, of a decisive character. 

Of the society whinh Cumberland found in 
Dublin, I cannot do better than copy the account 
in his own words. I have already borne testimony 
to the felicity with which he sketches characters, 
and it would be a puerile ambition in me to discard 
his phraseology for the introduction of my own. 

" Hamilton, who in the English parliament got 
the nick-name of Single-speech, spoke well, but 
not often, in the Irish House of Commons. He 
had a promptitude of thought, and a rapid flow of 
well-conceived matter, with many other requisites, 
that only seemed waiting for opportunities to 
establish his reputation as an orator. He had a 
striking countenance, a graceful carriage, great 
self-possession and personal courage : he was not 
easily put out of his way by any of those unac- 
commodating repugnances, that men#of weaker 
nerves or more tender consciences might have 
stumbled at, or been checked by ; he could mask 
the passions, that were natural to him, and assume 
those, that did not belong to him: he was inde- 
fatigable, meditative, mysterious ; his opinions 
were the result of long labour and much reflection * 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 137 

but be had the art of setting them forth as if they 
were the starts, of ready genius and a quick per- 
ception : he had as much seeming steadiness as a 
partisan could stand in need of, and all the real 
flexibility, that could suit his purpose, or advance 
his interest. He would fain have retained his 
connexion with Edmund Burke, and associated 
him to his politics, for he well knew the value of 
his talents, but in that object he was soon disap- 
pointed : the genius of Burke was of too high a 
cast to endure debasement. 

" The bishopric of Elphinbecame vacant, and was 
offered to Doctor Crane, who, though moderately 
beneficed in England, withstood the temptation 
of that valuable mitre, and disinterestedly declined 
it. This was a decisive instance of the purity as 
well as moderation of his mind, for had he not 
disdained all ideas of negociation in church pre- 
ferments, he might have accepted the see of Elphin, 
and traded with it in England, as others have done 
both before and since his time. He was not a man 
of this sort ; he returned to his prebendal house at 
Westminster in the little Cloysters, and some 
years before his death resided in his parsonage 
house at Sutton, a living given him by Sir Roger 
Burgoyne, near to which I had a house, from which 
I paid him frequent visits, and with unspeakable 
concern saw that excellent man resign himself 
with patience truly christian to the dreadful and 
tormenting visitation of a cancer in his face. I 



138 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

was at my house at Tetworth near Sutton in Bed- 
fordshire, when he rode over to me one morning, 
and complained of a soreness on his lip, which he 
said he had hurt in shaving himself; it was hardly 
discernible, but alas! it contained the seeds of 
that dire disease, and from that moment kept 
spreading over his face with excruciating agony, 
which allowed him no repose, till it laid him in 
his grave. 

" By his refusal of Elphin, Doctor Oswald was 
promoted to an inferior bishopric, and my father 
thereby stood next upon the roll for a mitre : in 
the mean time he formed his friendships in Ireland 
with some of the most respectable characters, and 
made a visit, accompanied by my mother, to 
Doctor Pocock, Bishop of Ossory, at his episcopal 
house in Kilkenny. That celebrated oriental tra- 
veller and author was a man of mild manners and 
primitive simplicity : having given the world a full 
detail of his researches in Egypt, he seemed to 
hold himself excused from saying any thing more 
about them, and observed in general an obdurate 
taciturnity. In his carriage and deportment he 
appeared to have contracted something of the Arab 
character, yet there was no austerity in his silence, 
and though his air was solemn, his temper was 
serene. When we were on our road to Ireland, I 
saw from the windows of the inn at Daventry a 
cavalcade of horsemen approaching on a gentle 
trot, headed by an elderly chief in clerical attire, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 139 

who was followed by five servants at distances 
geometrically measured and most precisely main- 
tained, and who upon entering the inn proved to 
be this distinguished prelate, conducting his horde 
with the phlegmatic patience of a Scheik. 

" I found the state of society in Dublin very 
different from what I had observed in London ; 
the professions more intermixt, and ranks more 
blended ; in the great houses I met a promiscuous 
assembly of politicians, lawyers, soldiers, and 
divines ; the profusion of their tables struck me 
with surprise ; nothing that I had seen in England 
could rival the Polish magnificence of Primate 
Stone, or the Parisian luxury of Mr. Clements. 
The style of Dodington was stately, but there was 
a watchful and well-regulated ceconomy over all> 
that here seemed out of sight and out of mind. 
The professional gravity of character maintained 
by our English dignitaries were here laid aside, 
and in several prelatical houses the mitre was so 
mingled with the cockade, and the glass circulated 
so freely, that I perceived the spirit of conviviality 
was by no means excluded from the pale of the 
church of Ireland. 

" Primate Stone was at that time in the zenith 
of his power ; he had a great following ; his in- 
tellect was as strong as ever, but his constitution 
was in its waine. I had frequent occasions to 
resort to him, and much reason to speak highly of 
his candour and condescension. No man faced 



140 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

difficulties with greater courage, none overcame 
them with more address : he was formed to hold 
command over turbulent spirits in tempestuous 
seasons ; for if he could not absolutely rule the 
passions of men, he could artfully rule men by the 
medium of their passions ; he had great suavity of 
manners when points were to be carried by in- 
sinuation and finesse ; but if authority was neces- 
sarily to be enforced, none could hold it with 
a higher hand : he was an elegant scholar, a con- 
summate politician, a very fine gentleman, and in 
every character seen to more advantage than in 
that, which according to his sacred function should 
have been his chief and only object to sustain. 

" Doctor Robinson was by Lord Halifax trans- 
lated from the see of Ferns to that of Kildare. I 
had even then a presentiment that we were for- 
warding his advancement towards the primacy, 
and persuaded myself that the successor of Stone 
would be found in the person of the Bishop of 
Kildare. Of him I shall probably have occasion 
to speak more at large hereafter, for the acquaint- 
ance, which I had the honour to form with him at 
this time, was in the further course of it ripened 
into friendship and an intimacy, which he never 
suffered to abate, and I prized too highly to 
neglect. 

" I made but one short excursion from Dublin, 
and this was to the house of that gallant officer 
Colonel Ford, who perished in his passage to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. HI 

India, and who was married to a relation of my 
wife. Having established his fame in the battle 
of Plassey and several other actions, he seated 
himself at Johnstown in the centre of an inveterate 
bog, but the soil, such as it was, had the recom- 
mendation to him of being his native soil, and all 
its deformities vanished from his sight. 

" 1 had more than once the amusement of dining 
at the house of that most singular being George 
Faulkner, where I found myself in a company so 
miscellaneously and whimsically classed, that it 
looked more like a fortuitous concourse of oddities, 
jumbled together from all ranks, orders and de- 
scriptions, than the effect of invitation and design. 
Description must fall short in the attempt to con- 
vey any sketch of that eccentric being to those, 
who have not read him in the notes of Jephson, 
or seen him in the mimickry of Foote, who in his 
portraits of Faulkner found the only sitter, whom 
his extravagant pencil could not caricature ; for 
he had a solemn intrepidity of egotism, and a 
daring contempt of absurdity, that fairly outfaced 
imitation, and like Garrrick's Ode on Shakspeare, 
which Johnson said e defied criticism/ so did 
George in the original spirit of his own perfect 
buffoonery defy caricature. He never deigned to 
join in the laugh he had raised, nor seemed to 
have a feeling of the ridicule he had provoked : at 
the same time that he was pre-eminently and by 
preference the butt and buffoon of the company 5 



142 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

he could find openings and opportunities for hits 
of retaliation, which were such left-handed thrusts 
as few could parry: nobody could foresee where 
they would fall, nobody of course was fore-armed, 
and as there was in his calculation but one super- 
eminent character in the kingdom of Ireland, and 
he the printer of the Dublin Journal, rank was no 
shield against George's arrows, which flew where 
he listed, and fixed or missed as chance directed, 
he cared not about consequences. He gave good 
meat and excellent claret in abundance ; I sate at 
his table once from dinner till two in the morning, 
whilst George swallowed immense potations with 
one solitary sodden strawberry at the bottom of 
the glass, which he said w T as recommended to him 
by his doctor for its cooling properties. He never 
lost his recollection or equilibrium the whole time, 
and was in excellent foolery; it was a singular 
coincidence, that there was a person in company, 
who had received his reprieve at the gallows, and 
the very judge, who had passed sentence of death 
upon him. This did not in the least disturb the 
harmony of the society, nor embarrass any human 
creature present. All went off perfectly smooth, 
and George, adverting to an original portrait of 
Dean Swift, which hung in his room, told us 
abundance of excellent and interesting anecdotes 
of the Dean and himself with minute precision and 
an importance irresistibly ludicrous. There was 
also a portrait of his late lady Mrs. Faulkner, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 143 

which either made the painter or George a liar, for 
it was • frightfully ugly, whilst he swore she was 
the most divine object in creation* In the mean 
time he took credit to himself for a few deviations 
in point of gallantry, and asserted that he broke 
his leg in flying from the fury of an enraged hus- 
band, whilst Foote constantly maintained that he 
fell down an area with a tray of meat upon his 
shoulder, when he was journeyman to a butcher: 
I believe neither of them spoke the truth. George 
prosecuted Foote for lampooning, him on the stage 
of Dublin ; his counsel the prime serjeant com- 
pared him to Socrates and his libeller to Aristo- 
phanes ; this I believe was all that George got by 
his course of law ; but he was told he had the best 
of the bargain in the comparison, and sate down 
contented under the shadow of his laurels. In 
process of time he became an alderman ; I paid my 
court to him in that character, but I thought he 
was rather marred than mended by his dignity. 
George grew grave and sentimental, and sentiment 
and gravity sate as ill upon George, as a gown 
and square cap would upon a monkey." 

A short time previously to the departure of Lord 
Halifax from Ireland (in the government of which 
he was succeeded by the Duke of Northumber- 
land,) a vacancy happened in the bench of bishops, 
and Cumberland's father was promoted to the see 
of Clonfert. This vacancy occurred so imme- 
diately before the expiration of his lordship's go- 



144 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

vernment, that the right of nomination seemed 
almost to belong to his successor, and many and 
vigorous efforts were made to wrest it from Lord 
Halifax. But he firmly resisted the attempt, and 
bestowed the mitre upon one whose whole life 
did honour to his appointment, service to the 
church, and glory to God. 

But it was an advancement which he had not taught 
himself to expect, and the news of it came upon 
him with that suddenness of surprise which some- 
times gives an additional zest to joy. He had 
returned to his vicarage of Fulham, contented with 
the issue of his expedition, and prepared to wear 
out the remainder of his life in the discharge of its 
duties. When his son first apprised him of the 
vacancy, he listened to the probability of his pro- 
motion with a calm mind, observing that he did 
not think himself much adapted for public life, and 
that if he were presented to the vacant see, he 
should feel himself bound by conscience to use 
his patronage for the benefit of the clergy of his 
own diocese, to the utter exclusion of his English 
friends. This resolution he afterwards adopted, 
with a firmness of conscious rectitude which did 
him the highest honour. In the anticipation of 
his promotion, also, he expressed his determination 
to follow the illustrious example of his grandfather 
in the appropriation of his episcopal revenue, ob- 
serving that though he despaired of imitating him 
in the loftier features of his character, he hoped he 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 145 

should be able to escape degeneracy in the 
humbler course of his virtues. He manifested 
no avidity, however, to urge his suit, and abso- 
lutely forbad his son to importune Lord Halifax 
on the subject : " you have shewn your modera- 
tion/' added he, " in declining the title that was 
offered you ; let me, at least, betray no eagerness 
in courting that which may, or may not, devolve 
upon me. Had it not been for you it would never 
have come under my contemplation : I should still 
have remained parson of Stan wick ; but the same 
circumstances which have drawn you from your 
studies, have taken me from my solitude, and if 
you are thus zealous to transport me and your 
mother into another kingdom, I hope you will be 
not less solicitous to visit and console us with the 
sight of you, when we are there." 

This affectionate and paternal wish Cumberland 
amply gratified, and it must have been among the 
happiest reflections of his life that he had thus 
piously contributed to the comfort of such pa- 
rents. 

The reluctance which his father felt to impor- 
tune Lord Halifax upon the subject, did not delay 
the appointment ; and it was the joyful office of 
his son to announce to him his promotion to the 
see of Clonfert. He soon arranged his affairs and 
departed for Ireland with his wife and daughter; 
took possession of his bishopric, and. there re- 
mained, faithfully attentive to its duties till an- 

L 



146 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

other vacancy happening, he was translated to the 
see of Kilmore. 

Meanwhile, Lord Halifax received the seals of 
Secretary of State, and Cumberland could not but 
expect some preferment. He had devoted ten 
years of his life to his lordship's service, receiving 
in return an income certainly not sufficient for the 
support of that appearance which the situation 
imposed upon him ; and now that his patron had 
an opportunity of rewarding those years of assi- 
duous attention, without any personal sacrifice, it 
could not be very presumptuous in Cumberland to 
suppose that his will would be second to his 
power. But he knew not a courtier's code of 
ethics. He had studied our moral duties in ano- 
ther school, and when he applied his reasonings to 
the actions of a minister of state, he found them 
useless ; he found the simple notions of right and 
wrong too unadorned to captivate the hearts and 
minds of men, versed in the collusions of political 
science, and practised in the evasions of truth. 

Lord Halifax had to name an under-secretary, 
and, passing over him who had the fairest and most 
apparent right to the nomination, he appointed a 
Mr. Sedgewicke to the situation : a person whose 
claims amounted only to one year's attendance 
upon Lord Halifax in Ireland, as his Master of the 
Horse, and some little proficiency perhaps in 
details not yet familiar to Cumberland. To him 
however the vacancy was given ; and he stepped 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 14? 

into a station of honour and profit, by the mere 
aid of intrigue and subserviency to designs at 
which a better man would have spurned. When 
Cumberland tendered his services, as a matter of 
form, upon his lordship's appointment, he received 
this cool, brief, and repulsive answer- — he was not 
Jit for every situation. And wherein was his de- 
ficiency ? Because he could not fluently dis- 
course in French. Such was the ostensible reason ; 
but the real one was -so different that, as Cum- 
berland justly observes, " had he possessed the 
elegance and perfection of Voltaire himself in that 
language, he would not have been a step nearer to 
the office in question/' 

Driven from what might be considered as his 
legitimate road of promotion, he turned aside and 
sought for indemnification in humbler paths. 
And here, I cannot justify his conduct. It was 
not dishonourable, but it was mean ; it was not 
the course of a man perfectly high minded, who 
feels, with dignity, the contempt that is shewn him, 
and proves, by his actions, that it was unjustly 
bestowed. He retired from the employment of 
Lord Halifax, and condescended to apply for and 
accept, the very situation which his rival, Mr, 
Sedgewicke, had vacated. This was confirming 
that inferiority which Lord Halifax had asserted ; 
and it betrayed, likewise, an unworthy desire of 
money, for surely no other motive could prompt 
him to a step so inconsistent with his own re~ 

L 2 



14S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

spectability. Nor was the salary, attached to the 
situation, such as could render its possession an 
object of desire to a man whose feelings of pro- 
priety were not in total slavery to his avarice: it 
was but two hundred pounds a-year, certainly not 
necessarily an income of importance to a man 
whose talents might always procure more than that 
without any degradation. I do not wonder, there- 
fore, that when he mentioned his intention of ap- 
plying for this situation, (which was that of Clerk 
of the Reports to the Board of Trade), to Lord 
Halifax, his lordship remonstrated with him upon 
the indignity, and hinted at the meanness of sub- 
mi tting to such an office, after the situation he 
had stood in with respect to him. 

It had been no reply to this reproof had Cumber- 
land answered — " Why then does not your lordship 
provide for me more worthily ? — Why do you not 
give me a station fitter for one who has served under 
you in a post of confidence and trust ?" This might 
have been a reproach of his lordship's dereliction, 
but no justification of Cumberland's. The action 
by which he sought to retrieve the loss he had 
sustained, was one which belonged solely to him- 
self: it was not forced upon him by any injustice 
of others, nor by any considerations of necessity 
with regard to his own condition : he had lost 
something which might easily have been replaced 
by economy and industry in various paths of ex- 
ertion : but, submitting to be the successor of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 149 

him who had stepped info the vacancy he had a 
right to expect, and which he missed, from in- 
capacity, was a proceeding altogether foreign trom 
the feelings of a man whose self-reverence is 
founded upon a clear and distinct conception of 
what he owes to himself. I confess I wish Cum- 
berland had acted just the reverse of what he did, 
and nobly disdained a compensation which he 
could not but ignobly receive. 

Such was the termination of his intercourse 
with Lord Halifax ; an intercourse which com- 
menced auspiciously, but ended as court con- 
nexions commonly do, with disappointment 
and vexation. Had Cumberland been more ob- 
sequious, he had, perhaps, been more successful : 
and more obsequious he probably had been, but 
for a secret bias to literature which, wherever it 
exists, effectually controls every other passion, 
absorbs every other wish, and leaves its object 
no other desire but to signalise himself in the 
theatre which his imagination has adorned with 
the most profuse splendor. Eager to pursue the 
career of literary glory, which amused his fancy 
with its enticing forms, it is likely he was less 
zealous to court favour in her political haunts, 
satisfied if she bestowed enough to carry on the 
chief concerns of life, without demanding from 
him sacrifices that would enfeeble his pursuit of 
the renown he greatly coveted ; and hence, per- 
haps, he quietly sat down in Mr. Sedgewicke's 



150 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

place when capricious fortune had denied him 
a better. 

Whatever resentment Cumberland may have 
felt at the moment when he was thus injuriously 
treated by Lord Halifax, all remembrance of it 
seems to have subsided, when he wrote his Me- 
moirs, for the recollection of these events calls 
forth no revilings from his pen, no expressions of 
bitterness, nor any of those allowable censures 
which the contemplation of insincerity may be 
permitted to excite. Christian forbearance implies 
patience under every injury, and I hope it was 
from this motive only that Cumberland acted ; but 
human nature is so apt to rebel, and those feelings 
which heaven itself has given us, which education 
developes, which society brings into action, and 
which individual honour is compelled to summon 
as its safeguard and testimony, concur so power- 
fully to overthrow that perfect humility and suffer- 
ing which our Saviour so divinely taught and so 
divinely practised, that when I behold it acting 
without any alloy of human weakness, I own I am 
rather inclined to think it the guise of hypocrisy, 
which veils its resentments when they are in- 
effectual, rather than the language of a purely 
Christian meekness, which forgives as truly as it 
hopes to be forgiven. Not that I would insinuate 
this with regard to Cumberland, for I should abhor 
the man whose rancour neither the death of its 
object, nor the long lapse of years could subdue ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 1,51 

and it would redound only so much the more to 
the gentleness of his character to suppose that his 
mild recital of these transactions arose, not from an 
insensibility tohislordship'sdissimulation, but from 
a sincere oblivion in his own breast, of every senti- 
ment of anger and displeasure. What I have said, 
I have delivered as a general opinion, called forth 
by a contemplation of my subject ; and I have 
formed the opinion from a close observation of 
their conduct who talk most loudly of forgiveness 
of injuries; who affect most vehemently to prac- 
tise what they inculcate ; and who prove, by 
their actions, that they pardon only when they 
cannot revenge, and praise the loveliness of for- 
bearance when their hearts are bursting under its 
inevitable restraint. Their submission to injuries 
is involuntary, and, therefore unwilling : but they 
know how to mask their sentiments, and extract 
from a servitude they abhor, maxims of obedience 
which might sanctify the lips of a Saint. 

I know the difficulty with which our nature 
bends to the infliction of evil without forming a 
design (I will not say a wish — perhaps that's im* 
possible at the moment of suffering) of retaliation. 
I know also how hard it is so to subdue the evil 
passions of our heart, as to be able and willing to 
do justice to him who has wronged us ; and 
therefore I am the more willing to praise the 
placability of Cumberland, and the sincerity with 
which he allows, to Lord Halifax, those eminent 



\$¥ LIFE CTF CUMBERLAND. 

virtues and qualifications which he indubitably 
possessed. 

I had known him too intimately/' he observes, 
" not to know, in the very moment, of which I 
have been speaking, that what he was by accident 
he was not by nature. I am persuaded he was 
formed to be a good man, he might also have been 
a- great one: his mind was large, his spirit active, 
his ambition honourable; he had a carriage noble 
and imposing; his first approach attracted notice, 
his consequent address ensured respect ; if his 
talents were not quite so solid as some, nor alto- 
gether so deep as others, yet they were brilliant, 
popular, and made to glitter in the eyes of men; 
splendor was his passion ; his good fortune threw 
opportunities in his way to have supported it ; his 
ill fortune blasted all those energies which should 
have been reserved for the crisis of his public 
fame ; the first offices of the state, the highest 
honours which his sovereign could bestow, were 
showered upon him when the spring of his mind 
was broken, and his genius, like a vessel overloaded 
with treasure, but far gone in decay, was only 
precipitated to ruin by the very freight, that in its 
better days would have crowned it with prosperity 

and riches."- i<f He had filled the high stations 

of First Lord of Trade and Plantations, Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, Principal Secretary of State, 
First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Lieutenant of 
the County of Northampton, and Knight of the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 153 

Garter. He had no son, and his title is extinct. 
I saw him in his last illness, when his constitu- 
tion was an absolute wreck ; I never knew that 
man, whose life, if circumstantially detailed, 
would furnish a more striking moral, and a more 
tragical catastrophe. Nature endowed him libe- 
rally with her gifts, Fortune showered her favours 
profusely upon him, Providence repeatedly held 
forth the most extraordinary vouchsafements. 
What a mournful retrospection ! I am not bound 
to dwell upon it. I turn from it with horror/ ' 

Such was the mixture of applause and disappro- 
bation with which he mentioned his early friend 
and patron, when age had cooled his resentments, 
strengthened his mind, and invigorated his piety. 
Let us hear how he contemplated the same subject 
only a few weeks before his death. 

When in a luckless hour I threw aside 
My college gown, and Halifax was pleas'd 
To call me to his confidence, metbought 
Form more engaging never grac'd a court ; 
Aspiring, elegant, with genius fraught, 
A scholar in my native college train'd, 
With academic honours justly crown'd ; 
In his domestic character correet, 
The faithful husband of a virtuous wife- 
Such he appeared to me, and such he was ; 
A patron better fitted to attract 
My admiration than engage my love : 
Active in office, warm in party zeal, 
And if with eloquence not richly stor'd, 
Yet in deliv'ry he so grac'd his speech, 
That he stood high in fame, and first of those 
With whom Newcastle in that easy time 



1<54 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Held brief consult, and bustled through his day. 

But where no system is, chance gives no heed 

To cause or consequence, but veers about 

And as it whirl'd Newcastle's windmill round, 

It swept my patron out of place and power. 

Fierce war ensu'd ; high swell'd the indignant heart 

Of this bold Montagu, the foe declar'd 

Of his false friend ; but the same chance, that caus'd, 

Soon cur'd the mischief and allay'd the strife. 

So this short tragedy was soon wound up, 

And Montagu and Capulet shook hands.— 

Heav'n ! what sweet tempers politicians have ! 

Meanwhile of this sage minister I saw 

As much as my humility desir'd, 

And knew as much as small men know of great. 

Of him, with whom so much of life I pass'd, 

If more I were to tell, 'twould only prove 

The sun that rises clear may set in clouds." Retrospection.* 

Here the conclusion corresponds with that of 
the preceding extract, and they both refer to 
events well known, I suppose, to the author, but 
not very generally familiar to the world. They 
need not be so; he to whom they relate is dead: 
a solemn proposition : and I cannot help thinking 
that it would have been more decorous in Cumber- 
land to have refrained wholly from touching upon 
his vices, or to have done it more explicitly than 
by dark hints and exclamations of horror. These 
only serve to awaken the imagination without 
satisfying the reason ; and when conjecture is idly 
excited in its darkest colours, we all know that 

* A poem in familiar blank verse, devoted to the celebration of those 
characters and events which had been before celebrated in prose in his Me* 
moirs. It was published only a few weeks before his death. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 155 

there is a propensity in man to push it to extremities. 
I would deprecate, therefore, every attack which 
comes masked in the guise of exclamatory disgust 
or insidious benevolence, which, by a sinister kind 
of charity, affects to deplore the excesses it more 
than exposes by telling their existence, without 
disclosing their magnitude and quality. A man 
will sooner lose his character by a shrug of the 
shoulder aptly performed at his appearance, or a 
smile of significant surprise when he talks of ho- 
nesty, or a solemn shake of the head when another 
praises his integrity, than he will by any open 
and manifest attack conducted either by truth or 
artifice; and, by a parity of reasoning, to record 
the merits of any one, to refer mysteriously, at the 
conclusion, to the contrast between those merits 
and certain defects, and then abruptly to quit the 
discussion as one too heart-rending, too skocking 
to be pursued, is the most certain, though not the 
most allowable method, to make the reader believe 
all that we wish, and more than is true. 



156 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

CHAP. VII. 

Cumberland produces his Summer's Tale. — His 
felicity in being independent of booksellers, — Has 
a controversy with Bickerstaff. — Roused to a pur- 
suit of the legitimate drama by the remonstrance 
of Smith. — Visits Ireland with his family. — Ac- 
count of his father s improvements in the condition 
of the peasantry of his diocese. — Returns to Eng- 
land, and produces his comedy of The Bro- 
thers. — His mode of study censured. — The cha- 
racters of that play examined. — Mrs. Inchbald's 
opinion controverted. — The epilogue contains some 
delicate flattery to Garrick. — Arrogance of the 
prologue. 

Neither the duties nor the emoluments of his 
station, were such as tempted him to remain intel- 
lectually idle. He had leisure for labour, and 
occasion for money ; and he resorted to the stage 
as the easiest way of performing the one and ac- 
quiring the other. 

Bickerstaff had been successfully producing his 
Love in a Village^ and The Maid of the Mill; the 
people had acquired a relish for music and songs ; 
and an author who wished to try the issue of a dra- 
matic attempt could not select a plan less liable to 
miscarriage than the composition of an English 
opera. The judgment of the audience was trans- 
ferred from the mind to the ear ; the composer, the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 157 

fiddler, and the singer, ensured the success of the 
writer ; wit, humour, language, character, and in- 
cident, modestly retired from view, while a succes- 
sion of dialogues, leading naturally or not naturally 
to a song and a dance, supported the author's fame, 
and filled his pockets. 

An undertaking thus humble in performance 
was the first to which the dramatic muse of Cum- 
berland addressed herself; and after a few weeks 
diligence produced The Summer s Tale. The mu- 
sic was chiefly composed by Abel, Bach, Arne, 
and Arnold ; Beard, Miss Brent, Mr. and Mrs. 
Mattocks, supported the vocal parts ; and Shuter 
aided the comic : but with all this profusion of 
assistance, the piece languished through nine 
nights, and was then heard of no more. The 
motto which Cumberland prefixed to it when pub- 
lished, aptly .designated its value: — Vox, et pr ca- 
tered nihil: — yet, I should suspect his own opi- 
nion of its worthlessness to be rather assumed than 
real, for he attempted again to interest the public 
in its favour, by presenting it to their notice, some- 
what altered, and under the name of Amelia. He 
gave the profits of the ninth night to the Fund 
for the support of decayed actors : but the ninth 
night of an unsuccessful play would not produce 
a very splendid donation. 

Cumberland may now be considered as having 
made his deliberate decision, and entered upon 
that career which, I have already observed, was 
most congenial to his temper, pursuits, and ac- 



138 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

quirements. It deserves to be reckoned, how- 
ever, among the felicities of this period of his life, 
that his condition was such as exempted him 
from the degrading necessity of toiling for book- 
sellers as their drudge. His was a free election, 
and freely he pursued it. In privacy he excogi- 
tated the subjects he chose to discuss, in privacy 
he pursued them, wrote when he pleased, and 
what he pleased. His mind was not harrassed by 
the dread of poverty, and all its train of iron evils ; 
he saw no miseries hovering over his devoted steps 
if he remitted the eternal movements of his pen ; 
his genius suffered no insults from a race of men 
who estimate the progress of mind by the progress 
of a printer's compositor, and know no difference 
between the labours of excellence and those of 
rapidity ; who contract for the production of a 
book, as a man does for a suit of clothes, and pre- 
sume that it is as easy to controul the operations 
of intellect as those of a tailor's needle ; who 
have no conception that delay can produce benefit, 
or that to digest the materials of a work, to ar- 
range them with perspicuity, to amend, to revise, 
to pause for better modes of reason, or happier 
methods of illustration, would confer an additional 
value upon the performance that is to be pro- 
duced ; all this is unembodied fantasy, mere vi- 
sionary rant to them ; and the very thing they 
want, (a saleable commodity, to use their own 
phrase) is often defeated by their improvident haste 
to obtain it. From toils like these Cumberland 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 159 

was absolved ; he wrote for himself and from him- 
self; and it is only those, who like a Johnson, a 
Goldsmith, and a Dryden, endured a harder fate, 
that can fully appreciate the value of that liberty, or 
fully feel the debasement and humility of its oppo- 
site slavery. If there be a condition more truly 
lamentable than another, it is that where a man of 
talent is doomed, by the augustce res domi, to tra- 
mel in his mind to the conceptions of those who 
rate the labours of intellect like the labours of the 
hand, by the simple computation of reiterated mo- 
tion. The history of literature is full of instances 
which justify this anathema; it is a servitude 
which every man, who can. feel its bitterness must 
wish to see destroyed. It is not imaginary : it has a 
real existence : hundreds have smarted beneath 
the yoke : hundreds still pine under its galling 
pressure : and hundreds yet unborn will feel it too. 
Credidi, propter quod locutus sum. 

Exceptions there have been, honourable excep- 
tions, to this general character. I have known 
some : I have read of more than I have known ; 
the names of Elmsley, Becket, and Nichols, are 
recorded in the imperishable pages of men of ge- 
nius ; they deserve to be so, and I wish the list 
could be extended beyond my patience to transcribe. 
Cumberland, happy in enjoying a privilege of 
value, beyond all price, to an intellectual man, 
found other enemies to combat with, teasing 
enough, but not so formidable to a man's happi- 
ness. The jealous spirit of literary enterprise so 



160 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

far prevailed in Bickerstaff, that he considered the 
composition and production of operas as his own 
unalienable right ; as a possession which he had 
acquired, nobody enquired how, but which no- 
body was to infringe upon. Accordingly, when 
Cumberland presumed to occupy a portion of that 
territory which he had vainly marked out as his 
own, he employed every engine of open and con- 
cealed hostility, to drive him from his lodgement. 
Intelligence of this enmity reached the knowledge 
of its object, and Cumberland, perfectly with the 
spirit and liberality of a gentleman, remonstrated 
with the petulant and monopolising author. He 
considered his attack as arising not from any mo- 
tives of personal dislike, but from those feelings 
which possess a man when he believes another to 
be unfairly obstructing his livelihood. Bickerstaff 
had persuaded himself, that all competition with 
him was, in fact, a direct violation of his rights ; and 
as his whole support was derived from the emolu- 
ments which his musical productions supplied, he 
was naturally solicitous respecting any interference 
which threatened to abridge those emoluments. 
These were the arguments of a needy man, but not 
of a just one. They were such, however, as had 
their weight with Cumberland, and he wrote to 
Bickerstaff upon the subject. The letter he did 
not preserve ; but its purport was this, " that if 
his contempt of Cumberland's performance was 
really what he professed it to be, he had no need 
to fear him as a rival, and might relax from his in- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 161 

temperance; on the contrary, if alarm for his own 
interest had any share in the motives for his ani- 
mosity, he was perfectly ready to purchase his 
peace of mind and good will by the sacrifice of 
those emoluments, which might eventually accrue 
from his rights, in any such way as might relieve 
his anxiety, and convince him of his entire disin- 
terestedness in commencing author*, adding, in 
conclusion, that he might assure himself he would 
never hear of him again as a writer of operas." 

This promise he did not wholly perform, for he 
produced one or two musical pieces afterwards, but 
it was, I believe, when BickerstafF had ceased to 
bring forth any. By thus separating himself from 
the road which led to competition, these two au- 
thors lived in concord afterwards, and BickerstafF 
was candid enough to acknowledge to Garrick that 
his conduct had been violent and unjustifiable, 
and that no future opportunity should tempt him 
to a renewal of such proceedings. An opportunity, 
however, either for his aggression or forbearance, 
was not afforded him again. 

Cumberland's mind was first aroused to the con- 
templation and performance of worthier objects of 
dramatic structure, by the reproof of his fellow-col- 
legian, Smith, who was distinguished as an actor of 
the old school, and to whom most of the dramatists 

* This was a declaration which Cumberland might have spared. It is 
with me, beyond a doubt, that his motives for commencing - author were to 
improve his circumstances, 

M 



162 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

of his day were much in deb ted for the support he gave 
to their characters. He had been educated at St. 
John's, but turned aside from the path to which, 
it may be presumed, his studies were preparatory, 
to follow the strange vicissitudes of a theatrical 
life ; a life so little to be loved or coveted, in its 
outset, and so little enviable in any stage, short 
of pre-eminence in the art, that I have heard 
a living actor, who justly enjoys that pre-emi- 
nence, but who attained it through every gradation 
of histrionic misery, pathetically deplore its 
wretchedness, and vehemently dissuade from its 
adoption, but as the last resource of desperate cir- 
cumstances. Like an author, however, the de- 
luded candidate for renown is bewildered by vi- 
sionary bursts of applause, by fancied honours, 
and by the blandishments of vanity which eter- 
nally whisper in his ears, the highest place is re- 
served for you. 

The remonstrance of Smith had its due effect 
upon Cumberland, as the reader may easily antici- 
pate. 

Wherrfhe Board of Trade broke up for its usual 
recess, in the summer of this year, Cumberland 
prepared to fulfil the promise which the affection 
of his father had drawn from him, and which his 
own heart no less prompted him to pay. Accom- 
panied by his wife, and part of his family, he vi- 
sited Ireland. The pleasure with which he met 
his parents, and the filial pride with which he 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 163 

recounts the beneficial exertions of the Bishop to 
reform the peasantry of his diocese, shall be told 
in his own words. 

" They waited for us in Dublin, where my fa- 
ther had taken the late of Bishop of Meath's house 
in Kildare-street, next door to the Duke of Lein- 
ster's. When we had reposed ourselves for a few 
days, after the fatigues of a turbulent passage, we 
all set off for Clonfert, in the county of Galway. 
Every body, who has travelled in Ireland, and 
witnessed the wretched accommodation of the 
inns, particularly in the west, knows that it re- 
quires some forecast and preparation to conduct a 
large family on their journey. It certainly is as 
different from travelling in England as possible, 
and not much unlike travelling in Spain ; but with 
my father for our provider, whose appointments of 
servants and equipage were ever excellent, we 
could feel few wants, and arrived in good time at 
our journey's end, where, upon the banks of the 
great river Shannon, in a nook of land, on all sides, 
save one surrounded by an impassable bog, we 
found the episcopal residence, by courtesy called 
palace, and the church of Clonfert, by custom 
called cathedral. This humble residence was not 
devoid of comfort and convenience, for it con- 
tained some tolerable lodging rooms, and was ca- 
pacious enough to receive me and mine without 
straitening the family. A garden of seven acres, 
well planted, and disposed into pleasant walks, 
M 2 



164 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

kept in the neatest order, was attached to the 
house, and at the extremity of a broad gravel walk 
in front, stood the cathedral. Within this boun- 
dary the scene was cheerful : all without it was 
either impenetrable bog, or a dreary undressed 
country ; but whilst all was harmony, hospitality, 
and affection, underneath the parental roof, c the 
mind was its own place,' and every hour was 
happy. My father lived, as he had ever done, 
beloved by all around him ; the same benevolent 
and generous spirit, which had endeared him to 
his neighbours and parishioners in England, now 
began to make the like impressions on the hearts 
of a people as far different in character as they 
were distant in place, from those whom he had 
till now been concerned with. Without descend- 
ing from the dignity he had to support, and con- 
descending to any of the paltry modes of courting 
popularity, I instantly perceived how high he 
stood in their esteem ; these observations I was 
perfectly in the way to make, for I had no forms to 
keep, and was withal uncommonly delighted with 
their wild eccentric humours, mixing with all 
ranks and descriptions of men, to my infinite amuse- 
ment. If I have been successful in my dramatic 
sketches of the Irish character, i t was here I studied it 
in its purest and most primitive state ; from high to 
low it was now under my view. Though I strove 
to present it in its fairest and best light upon the 
stage, truth obliges me to confess there was an- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 165 

other side of the picture, which could not have 
been contemplated without affright and horror! 
Atrocities and violences, which set all law and 
justice at defiance! were occasionally committed in 
this savage and licentious quarter, and suffered to 
pass over with impunity. In the neighbouring- 
town of Eyre Court, they had, by long usage, 
assumed to themselves certain local and self-con- 
stituted privileges and exemptions, which ren- 
dered it unapproachable by any officers or emis- 
saries of- the civil power, who were universally de- 
nounced as mad-dogs, and subjected to be treated 
as such, and even put to death, with as little cere- 
mony or remorse. I speak of what actually oc- 
curred within my own immediate knowledge, 
whilst I resided with my father, in more instances 
than one, and those instances would be shocking 
to relate. To stem these daring outrages, and to 
stand in opposition to these barbarous customs, 
was an undertaking that demanded both philan- 
thropy and courage, and my father of course was 
the very man to attempt it. Justice and genero- 
sity were the instruments he employed, and I saw 
the work of reformation so auspiciously begun, 
and so steadily pursued by him, as convinced me 
that minds the most degenerate may be to a de- 
gree reclaimed by actions that come home to their 
feelings, and are evidently directed to the sole pur- 
poses of amending their manners, and improving 
their condition. To suppose they were a race of 



166 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

beings stupidly vicious, devoid of sensibility, and 
delivered over by their natural inertness, to barba- 
rism and ignorance, would be the very falsest cha- 
racter that could be conceived of them ; it is, on 
the contrary, to the quickness of their apprehen- 
sive faculties, to the precipitancy and unrestrained 
vivacity of their talents and passions, that we must 
look for the causes, and in some degree for the ex- 
cuse of their excesses ; together with their feroci- 
ous propensities there are blended and compounded 
humours so truly comic, eccentricities so peculiar, 
and attachments and affections at times so incon- 
ceivably ardent, that it is not possible to contem- 
plate them in their natural characters, without be- 
ing diverted by extravagancies, which we cannot 
seriously approve, and captivated by professions 
which we cannot implicitly give credit to. 

" The bishop held a considerable parcel of land, 
arable and grazing, in his hands, or more properly 
speaking in the phrase of the country, a large 
demesne, with a numerous tribe of labourers, gar- 
deners, turf-cutters, herdsmen, and handicraft- 
men of various denominations. — His first object, 
and that not an easy one to attain, was to induce 
them to pursue the same methods of husbandry as 
were practised in England, and to observe the same 
neat and cleanly course of cultivation. This was a 
great point gained ; they began it with unwillingness, 
and watched it with suspicion : their idle neigh- 
bours, who were without employ, ridiculed the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 167 

work, and predicted that their hay-stacks would 
take fire, and their corn be rendered unfit for use ; 
but in the further course of time, when they ex- 
perienced the advantages of this process, and wit- 
nessed the striking contrast of these productive 
lands, compared with the slovenly grounds around 
them, they began to acknowledge their own errors, 
and to reform them. With these operations the 
improvements of their own habitations were con- 
trived to keep pace : their cabins soon wore a 
more comfortable and decent appearance ; they 
furnished them with chimnies, and emerged out 
of the smoke, in which they had buried and suf- 
focated their families and themselves. When these 
old habits were corrected within doors, on the 
outside of every one of them there was to be seen 
a stack of hay, made in the English fashion, 
thatched and secured from the weather, and a lot 
of potatoes, carefully planted and kept clean, 
which, with a suitable proportion of turf, secured 
the year's provision both for man and beast. 
When these comforts were placed in their view, 
they were easily led to turn their attention to the 
better appearance of their persons, and this reform 
was not a little furthered by the premium of a 
Sunday's dinner to all, who should present them- 
selves in clean linen and with well-combed hair, 
without the customary addition of a scare-crow 
wig, so that the swarthy Milesian no longer ap- 
peared with a yellow wig upon his coal-black hair, 



168 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

nor the yellow Dane with a coal-black wig upon 
his long red locks : the old barbarous custom also 
of working in a great coat loosely thrown over the 
shoulders, with the sleeves dangling by the sides, 
was now dismissed, and the bishop's labourers 
turned into the field, stript to their shirts, proud 
to shew themselves in whole linen, so that in 
them vanity operated as a virtue, and piqued them 
to excel in industry as much as they did in ap- 
pearance. As for me, I. was so delighted with 
contemplating a kind of new creation, of which 
my father was the author, that I devoted the 
greatest portion of my time to his works, and had 
full powers to prosecute his good intentions to 
whatever extent I might find opportunities for 
carrying them. This commission was to me 
most gratifying, nor have any hours in my past 
life been more truly satisfactory, than those in 
which I was thus occupied as the administrator of 
his unbounded benevolence to his dependant fel- 
low creatures. My father, being one of the go- 
vernors of the Linen Board, availed himself also 
of the opportunity for introducing a branch of that 
valuable manufacture into his neighbourhood, and 
a great number of spinning-wheels were distri- 
buted, and much good linen made in consequence 
of that measure. The superintendance of this 
improving manufacture furnished an interesting 
occupation to my mother's active mind, and it 
nourished under her care." 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 169 

When he returned from Ireland he brought out his 
first comedy at Covent Garden theatre. The piece 
was entitled The Brothers, and was produced, ac- 
cording to Cumberland, in a desultory manner; 
written at snatches of time, in the midst of his 
children, and surrounded with the noise, confu- 
sion, and amusements of a nursery. Whether he 
tells this to extenuate its faults, or to prove the 
pliability of his thoughts, which could accommo- 
date themselves to such a mode of study, I do not 
know : but it seems to me an evidence, not of 
peculiar powers of abstraction, but of that medio- 
crity of employment which nothing can disturb, 
because it requires no attention to perform. A 
man may write a song in the midst of singing, or 
a book for children surrounded with children ; or, 
he may pen the loose and unconnected scenes 
of a play, where the dialogue does not rise above 
the level of colloquial discourse, where the cha- 
racters are drawn from the surface of life, and the 
sentiments are derived from superficial manners su- 
perficially pourtrayed, without any interruption 
from tumult or conversation : all this he might do 
in a cotton-mill as well as in a nursery ; but let 
no man say that he can plan a series of well con- 
trived incidents, that he can observe an artificial 
coherency between them, that he can elicit cha- 
racters and adequately support them, that he can 
form a quick and animated reciprocation of dia- 
logue sparkling with wit, elegant and appropriate, 



170 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

that he can devise scenes of humour and pourtray 
them, that he can conduct his whole action to 
such a developement at the end as may surprise 
by its novelty, yet please by its probability, and 
that he can maintain the interest of the piece from 
its commencement to its close, in the midst of 
turmoil and distraction, environed with children 
at their gambols, or absorbed in the details of bu- 
siness. This may be attempted, but will never 
be performed ; and he who does attempt it will find 
that leisure, solitude, and retirement, are requisite 
to every intellectual undertaking which aspires to 
permanent celebrity and success. Inferior per- 
formances may be brought forth with inferior 
means of excellence : but nothing that is truly great 
has ever been achieved under the actual and im- 
mediate disqualifications of noise and distraction. 
The Brothers was produced in 1769 ? at the sole 
responsibility of Mr. Harris, then one of the pro- 
prietors of the theatre ; for it seems that his asso- 
ciates did not give their sanction to its appearance ; 
and its success on the stage, in some measure, 
justified his opinion, whatever conclusions may 
be drawn as to its merits in the closet. To 
me indeed it appears to want precisely that 
which it was impossible its author should give 
it, composing it in the manner already de- 
scribed. It wants variety of incident, and a skil- 
ful coherency of action : the scenes are hurried on 
with too much rapidity ; that which is required is 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 171 

produced at the author's will, not as the necessary 
or probable effect of preceding events. There is 
no exhibition of original character. Perfidious 
brothers, wittol husbands, peevish mistresses, and 
licentious wives, are the common property of stage 
writers, and afford few opportunities for novelty of 
situation or of sentiment. The author is tied 
down by the familiarity of his plot, and follows too 
servilely the steps of his predecessors. 

The only character that can be considered as 
original in the hands of Cumberland is that of 
Captain Ironsides : but if we admit that nothing is 
to be ascribed to the remembrance of Cqngreve's 
Ben, we shall be forced to allow that much may 
be referred to the recollection of Smollett's Lieu- 
tenant Bowling, and Commodore Trunnion : while 
Skiff is only Pipes transferred from the novel to 
the play. 

The diction is neither comic nor tragic : it wants 
the sprightliness of the one and the dignity of the 
other. It is so little suited to the characters, 
that except the technical jargon of Ironsides and 
Skiff, it might be spoken by any of them without 
any violation of propriety. The dialogue is a cold 
interchange of conversation, relieved neither by 
wit nor humour : it is merely elegant discourse. 

In delivering this opinion I am not unconscious 
how much I differ from that of a lady, (Mrs. 
Inchbald) with whom I should be proud to concur 
upon a question of dramatic criticism, for her 



172 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

knowledge of the subject may be presumed to be 
accurate both in speculation and practice. I can- 
not, however, gainsay the dictates of my own 
mind, in deference to the decisions of another. 
Mrs. Inchbald says, " that the Brothers is ac- 
knowledged by all critics to be a very good play." 
I would ask what critics have allowed this ? I 
know of none that have said so ; and if she means 
to refer to the diurnal critics of the time, I should 
not hesitate to disregard their authority, in any 
question of literature. To say that it is a very 
good play, is a prostitution of language : it may 
have merits of a certain sort : but that its 
merits entitle it to that unqualified approbation 
which is contained in the sentence I have quoted, 
is what no one will affirm who has read the piece 
and judges dispassionately. 

Mrs. Inchbald knows what belongs to a good 
comedy. Some of her remarks upon this very 
drama prove that she does. But it is one of the 
inconveniences of criticism upon contemporary 
writers, that few have boldness enough to say 
what they think, unless they speak from the in- 
fluence of some personal antipathy. I cannot believe 
that Mrs. Inchbald would have said as much of 
the Brothers had it been the production of Colley 
Gibber, or of any deceased author. Her censure 
would have manifested more distinct and decisive 
features, while her praises, being unbiassed, would 
have relished more of sincerity. 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 173 

Cumberland himself has ventured to claim for a 
particular part of this comedy, a commendation 
which the critic cannot allow. He says that the 
sudden manifestation of spirit and command, in 
Sir Benjamin Dove, " is one of those starts of cha- 
racter which is always a striking incident in the 
construction of a drama, and when a revolution of 
that sort can be brought about without violence to 
nature, and for purposes essential to the plot, it is a 
point of art well worthy the attention and study of 
a writer for the stage. The comedy of Rule a W T ife 
and have a Wife, and particularly that of Mas- 
singer's City Madam, are strong instances in 
point." 

To the principles laid down in this passage, as 
applying to a general truth, no one will object : 
and the instances adduced by Cumberland of their 
effect are strong proofs of their justness. But those 
instances are strangely misapplied in supposing 
that they are at all similar to the case of Sir 
Benjamin Dove, Leon, in Rule a Wife and have a 
Wife, is a fool, and the pliant tool of his wife, for a 
time only ; he has a specific purpose in view, which 
is known to the audience almost from the first, and 
which justifies his assumed stolidity and uxorious 
submission ; when, therefore, " he throws his 
cloud off, and appears himself/' the spectator is 
pleased at the transformation but hardly surprised ; 
for he had a general anticipation of such a meta- 
morphosis : the precise course indeed of his ac- 



174 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tions afterwards, how far he would enforce his 
authority and vindicate himself from his fatuity 
(which, like the elder Brutus, he wore only as a 
mask to conceal his aim at a nobler object), he 
does not foresee : but the act itself of re-assuming 
his character, he is frequently prepared for by the 
intimations of Leon himself. In the City Madam 
of Massinger also, Lukes stupidity is only a 
feigned one : a counterfeited baseness, manifested 
no longer than circumstances required it, and suc- 
ceeded by a character of energetic villainy very 
distinct from what preceded it. In both these 
instances the change is natural because the de- 
ception is unnatural, and probable, because it is 
produced by adequate causes. But the craven- 
spirited Sir Benjamin is a tame fool, with no other 
motive for being so than a man who squints has for 
obliquity of vision : because he could not help it. 
His submission to his wife's fantastic humours, to 
her freakish tyranny, to her unyoked caprice, has no 
secret aim : he endures her suspected infidelity 
patiently from no concealed project of revenge : 
his baseness is not fictitious but real, not merely 
an outward shew but an inborn pusillanimity of 
disposition : and his sudden display of vigour and 
dignity, therefore, towards the conclusion of the 
play, is a direct violation of probability : it is a 
miracle indeed which the author works, but which 
neither the spectator nor the reader believes ; and 
it is essentially distinguished from that " start of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 175 

character," which Cumberland has justly praised 
in Beaumont and Fletcher, and in Massinger. 
By what fallacy he persuaded himself that they 
w r ere similar instances of excellence I know not: 
I have shewn that they cannot be compared with 
each other. 

The production of this play was the immediate 
occasion of an introduction to Garrick, and of a 
subsequent intimacy between him and Cumber- 
land. Garrick, who was present at its first per- 
formance, was unexpectedly gratified by an allu- 
sion to his theatrical excellence, which Cumber- 
land dextrously introduced in the epilogue in the 
following lines : — 

" Who but hath seen the celebrated strife, 
Where Reynolds calls the canvas into life ; 
And 'twixt the tragic and the comic muse, 
Courted of both, and dubious where to choose, 
Th' immortal actor stands ." 

This was flattery delicately administered ; and 
as Cumberland did not, I presume, know that its 
object would be present, (though perhaps he might 
anticipate such an event as probable) its intro- 
duction had all the appearance of sincerity. The 
consequence was that Mr. Fitzherbert, the father 
of Lord St. Helen, who was in the box with 
Garrick, immediately went over to the one where 
Cumberland was sitting, and told him how much 
the manager was pleased with the unexpected 
compliment : the immortal actor, from that time, 



176 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

sought every opportunity of cultivating his friend- 
ship, and Cumberland reaped the harvest of his 
panegyric in the production of his future dramas 
under the superintendance of Garrick. 

But, if the epilogue gained one friend, the pro- 
logue made many enemies. It was written in a 
style of conscious superiority which excited very 
general displeasure ; and it contained an attack 
upon contemporary dramatists which no one 
should make who consults his own peace, with 
whatever pretensions to pre-eminence he may 
think himself graced. After upbraiding them with 
gleaning from novels, pilfering from periodical pub- 
lications, and purloining from French writers, he 
ventured to insinuate, in the following lines, that 
his play had none of these vices, but was composed 
of original and indigenous materials. 

" Not so our bard, to night he bids me say, 
You shall receive and judge an English play : 
From no man's jest he draws felonious praise, 
Nor from his neighbour's garden crops his bays : 
From his own breast the filial story flows, 
And the free scene no foreign master knows : 
Nor only tenders he his work as new : 
He hopes 'tis good, or would not give it you." 

There was neither poetry nor prudence in these 
lines : and when Cumberland, in his Memoirs, 
strove to vindicate them by an appeal to the lofty 
independence which characterised Johnson's pro- 
logue to his Irene, he should have remembered 
the mighty chasm which separated him from the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 177 

man whose authority he would produce as his own 
justification. I do not however think, that even the 
arrogance of Johnson is to be applauded : it was 
characteristic of the writer, but it was an example 
which does not deserve to be followed. In a 
situation where success confessedly does not 
always follow merit, and where the decision that 
is delivered can be revoked by no appeal, it is 
surely more prudent to conciliate than to dare our 
judges : and as no man loves to be bullied even 
into justice, I suspect an author does not much 
advance his interest who proudly claims, as his 
right, what caprice may withhold or may give, and 
what he can obtain from no other dispensers of 
public honours than those whom he would in- 
timidate into an acknowledgement of his merits. 
There is something in arrogance, however sup- 
ported by ability, which is sure to offend : and 
though a haughty candidate for renown may snatch 
the laurel without deigning to solicit it, he will 
wear it with less complacent pride, and less good 
will from mankind, than the modest suitor whose 
hopes are proudly turned towards success, but 
whose humility teaches him to value it as a gift 
best bestowed, when bestowed with the concur- 
rent assent of his contemporaries. 



N 



178 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND 

CHAP. VIII. 

Cumberland the original of Sheridan's Si:r 
Fretful Plagiary.- — Miss Seward's opi- 
nion of Cumberland* s Memoirs. — Censure of 
her Letters, recently published. — Instances of 
her vanity, affectation, and vitiated phraseology. 
— Mr. Walter Scott's Portrait. — Mr. Sou- 
they's Poem of Ma doc neglected by the pre- 
sent generation. — The Rev. Mr. Fellowes' sa- 
gacity, aided by the sagacity of Mr. Scott. — 
Cumberland writes the West Indian. — Account 
of some adventures which happened to him in 
Ireland. 
Cumberland repeatedly reminds his readers that 
he has written a greater number of plays than any 
other English author : the remark may be true : 
but a prolific pen must not be confounded with a 
vigorous one. It is from the quality of the pro- 
duct that we judge of the soil, not from the 
quantity. To produce much betokens fertility ; 
but to produce well, is a proof of something better 
than fecundity. 

In the 269th page' of the first volume of his 
Memoirs, he enters into a laboured vindication of 
himself from all envy towards other authors, and 
from all unfair modes of exalting or upholding his 
own reputation. He refers, explicitly, to a report 
which had been circulated respecting his endea- 
vours to decry the merits of The School for 
Scandal at its first appearance ; and he affirms 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 179 

that he offered his accuser positive proof of his 
being at Bath during the first run of that very 
superior comedy. The gentleman (a reviewer) 
was convinced, he says, of his innocence, but had 
no opportunity of testifying his conviction to the 
world : of course the accusation remains uncon- 
tradicted except in the avowal of Cumberland 
himself. 

The anecdote, as I have heard it stated, was 
this. When Sheridan produced his School for 
Scandal^ Cumberland, who sat in a conspicuous 
part of the theatre, preserved an inflexible rigidity 
of muscle as often as the audience were testifying 
their approbation by repeated bursts of laughter, 
and he frequently expressed his surprise that they 
should laugh at what had not the power even to 
make him smile. There are social traitors in every 
circle, and one such soon conveyed the sarcasm 
to Sheridan, who coolly and wittily replied that 
it was something ungracious in Cumberland not 
to laugh at his comedy, when he had lately laughed 
at one of his tragedies from the beginning to the 
end. This was no doubt soon re-echoed in the 
ears of Cumberland; and thus began that hostility 
which led to Sheridan's severe exposure of his 
opponent in Sir Fretful Plagiary*. 

* This anecdote I have retained, because it is commonly believed, and 
is related with all the confidence of truth. But it proceeds upon an erro- 
neous supposition. Cumberland produced his first tragedy, (The Battle cj 
Hastings) in 1778 ; — The School for Scandal was acted in 1776. If Cum- 

NS 



180 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

This is one account. There is another which 
states the provocation to have been given by Cum- 
berland in his farce of the Note of Hand, or a 
Trip to Newmarket, in which some satire is levelled 
against the late Charles Fox, the Duke of Devon- 
shire, and others, who were the heads of that party 
under whose banners Sheridan had enlisted 
himself. To retaliate the satire, he projected 
and exhibited Sir Fretful. Which of these rela- 
tions is true, or whether either of them has any 
right to be believed I cannot tell. The question 
can be satisfactorily answered only by one man. 

It has been a very generally received opinion, 
however, that Sir Fretful Plagiary was in- 
tended for Cumberland : and so true was the re- 
semblance, I have been told, that one of his sons 
being present at the representation immediately 
recognised his father. The late Miss Seward, in- 
deed, draws an inference, even from his Memoirs, 
which 1 confess appears to me unwarranted by the 
general tenor of that work. 

berland therefore did not laugh at Sheridan's comedy, it is most certain 
that Sheridan could not then have laughed at his tragedy. If we suppose, 
however, that Cumberland was not present at the representation of the 
School for Scandal, till some time after its first appearance, (which will 
agree with his own account), and that his solemnity was exhibited when he 
did see it (probably after the production of the Battle of Hastings) , then 
Sheridan, without any violation of chronology, might have uttered the 
retort mentioned in the text, and have avenged himself by drawing the 
character of Sir Fretful the ensuing year (1779), when the Critic was first 
performed. Or, v/e may apply this inference to the supposition that the 
tacit censure of Cumberland was not conveyed to Sheridan till long after 
the period of its expression. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 181 

c; In despite/' says she,* " of Mr. Cumberland's 
repeated disavowals of envy and injustice towards 

* See her Correspondence lately published, Vol. vi. p. 309. Of this 
heterogeneous mass of vanity, pedantry, and virulence, let me take this 
occasion to give my opinion. 

It is perhaps unexampled in the history of literature, patiently to com- 
pose letters that were to be afterwards patiently copied, and patiently 
to be treasured up as a valuable bequest to mankind. I know not whe- 
ther most to condemn the egregious egotism of this proceeding, or its 
folly. I can find only one excuse for it, and that is the writer's sex. How 
eminently her friends must value her correspondence now that they find 
they were made merely the convenient vehicles for amassing a heap of 
letters which, in their original conception, were intended, not to answer 
the common purpose of such compositions ; not to be the unaffected me- 
dium of conveying kindness, truth, or counsel, to an absent friend or 
relative ; but to serve as repositories for her own notions upon literature, 
politics, and morals, to be copied diligently into a common place book, and 
to be bequeathed to a bookseller for publication after her death. Her 
letter to Mr. Constable, in which this bequest is communicated to him, is 
an accurate picture of female vanity and literary coquetry. 

In passing from the principle which dictated this compilation, to its 
execution, I do not find much to approve. I have been very thoroughly 
disgusted with her pertness, her affectation, and her vitiated style ; and 
I have been more than disgusted with her rancour towards the memory of 
Johnson, whom, on every occasion, she malignantly traduces ; with her 
petty malice and envy towards some living authors ; and her hyperbolical 
adulation of others. In what she writes I find neither dignity of sentiment, 
novelty of remark, nor acuteness of criticism : on all occasions her judge- 
ments are the offspring of her passions : and we hence find some of the 
most respectable names of modern literature ridiculously depreciated, 
while others, who were never heard of till now found in these volumes, 
are tickled into a belief of such endowments as can be paralleled only 
by those which nature granted to a Shakspeare and a Milton. The reader 
stares w ith astonishment as he finds himself in the company of such illus- 
trious beings, and wonders by what fatality they were never known before ; 
but a moment's reflection dispels the illusion, and he remembers that Miss 
Seward praised all who praised her : that praise was a literary currency 
between her and her associates, which no depreciation could rob of its value ; 
and that no flattery is too gross for one author to give or another to 
receive. 



182 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

other authors, this egotistic volume of his rivets, 
instead of removing my long established conviction 

The only merit which these volumes can be said to possess is, that they 
contain some pleasing literary anecdotes : beyond that, I am yet to learn 
what other claims they have to approbation. Their sentimental effusions 
have nothing in them but antiquated raptures, or affected bursts of maudlin 
sympathy and tenderness. 

The opinion which I have here expressed has been formed from a very 
diligent inspection of the volumes I condemn ; and I will extend this 
note yet a little further, to communicate to my readers some of those pas- 
sages which have concurred, with others, to its production. 

Of her vanity, affectation, and vitiated phraseology, the following sen- 
tences, from p. 241 of Vol. iv. may serve as a specimen :■ — 

" That resemblance to Mrs. Fitzherbert, with which I have been so 
variously, so repeatedly flattered, was observed by the polite, obliging, and 
agreeable Lady Harewood last night, who has taken me to each assembly 
since I had first the honour of her notice, 

" So I think I will even go to Brighton instead of Harrowgate, to see if 
I cannot rival Lady Jersey, by recalling former impressions, and make a 
certain personage behave better to his amiable and lovely wife. Would 
not that be a nice piece of amorous Knight, or rather Knightess errantry ? 
My autumnalities would scarcely be an objection to a taste so partial to 
mellow fruit." 

Perhaps a perfectly delicate female might have omitted the last observa- 
tion, considering that the letter is addressed to a gentleman. 

In the same letter we have the following simple and unadorned descrip- 
tion of a hot day in August : — 

** A week ago, we had a sudden transition from hybernal coldness to skies 
of cloudless blaze. Phoebus shakes his fiery tresses on the rocks, and over 
the wide stretched mountains, that girdle this vale and its golden crescent. 
(The letter is written from Buxton.) The busy little world, that swarms 
in the Arcade and its precincts, now gasp beneath a climate, which I should 
suppose somewhat resembles the description of Mulciber's gilded palace in 
Pandemonium. The aspect of the crescent is south east. Its colonnade 
drinks the morning beams, and reflects tbem back with dazzling and op- 
pressive force. Those to whom the lines of Milton are familiar, might be 
inclined to exclaim, 

The torrid walls, vaulted with fire, 
Smite on their dazzled eyes." 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 183 

that Sheridan's portrait of him, Sir Fretful 
Plagiary, is not a caricature. That conviction 



This is miserable rant. Let it suffice for the writer's taste. 
Her hyperbolical adulation to living authors may be surmised from the 
following instance. In a letter to Mr. Southey is this sentence : — 

*' No foreigner ever did, or perhaps ever can attain that perfect know- 
ledge of our language which might enable him to comprehend the dignity 
and beauty of our noblest blank verse : consequently, they will never per- 
ceive the superiority of Shakspeare, Milton, and ." Imagine, reader, 

if you can, what name completes the triumvirate : but do not let your fancy 
revert to the productions of Thomson, Akenside, Armstrong, or Cowper : 
no : they were writers not to be joined with Shakspeare and Milton : hear 
then who was :< — '* consequently " says Miss Seward, " they will never 
perceive the superiority of Shakspeare, Milton, and Southey, to any 
writer that ever gemm'd the runic fetters with ideas even the most in- 
trinsically poetic." (Vol. VI. p. S76.J 

Of this passage the conclusion appears to me unintelligible nonsense : 
the rest I commit to the reader's judgment. How will he be surprised, 
however, to learn that this corrival of Shakspeare and Milton, this third 
poet tc whom no fourth can be found*, has fallen upon an age of such bar- 
barism that his " glorious poem" (I use Miss Seward's words) of Madoc 
produced, after a year's sale, no greater profit than— blush my country- 
men — blush ! "THREE POUNDS, SEVENTEEN SHILLINGS, and ONE PENNY." 

(See Vol. VI. Letter 66, p. 369). I can conceive with what pathetic ten- 
derness of expression, the " poetically great Southey," (Miss Seward's 
own words again, and her usual mode of compellation) communicated 
this afflicting intelligence to his sympathising friend. 

The fact, however, is a curious one. Does it proclaim the degeneracy 
or the purity of our national taste ? The answer is obvious. 

Mr. Walter Scott, I believe, is the avowed editor of these volumes. I 
wish it were possible to know how he felt when he read the proof of that 
sheet in the sixth volume, which contains the sixty-first letter. As it is 
another instance of what I have said respecting Miss Seward and this cor- 
respondence, I will transcribe a part of it here. It is addressed to a 
Mr. Carey. 



* What now becomes of Dryden's celebrated lines for the picture of 
Milton ? 



184 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

was founded on attested anecdotes of his ingra- 
titude, his pride, and his envy of superior writers." 

" More immediately should I have noticed the kind contents of 'your 
letter, had it arrived at a less interesting juncture. At two that day, Fri- 
day last, the poetically great Walter Scott came, like a sun beam, to my 
dwelling ! I found him sturdily maintaining the necessity of limiting 
his inexpressibly welcome visit to the next day's noon. You will not won- 
der that I could spare no minutes from hours so precious and so few. 

" Ah ! fortunate if one of your filial sojourners here had proved the 
means of introducing my poetic friends to each other. Such presentations 
are amongst my heart's luxuries, fyc." 

They who recollect the picture of Mr. Scott, prefixed to his Lady of the 
Lake, a sturdy little gentleman, cooling himself upon a stump, will be 
pleased with the following one by Miss Seward, and will admire the mo- 
desty of Mr. Scott in permitting its insertion : 

" This proudest boast of the Caledonian muse is tall, and rather robust 
than slender, but lame in the same manner as Mr. Hayley*, and in a 
greater measure. Neither the contour of his face, nor yet his features, are 
elegant ; his complexion healthy, and somewhat fair, without bloom. 
We find the singularity of brown hair and eye-lashes, with flaxen eye- 
brows, and a countenance open, ingenuous^ and benevolent. When seri- 
ously conversing, or earnestly attentive, though his eyes are rather of a 
lightish grey, deep thought is on their lids : he contracts his brow, and 
the rays of genius gleam aslant from the orbs beneath them. An upper 
lip, too long, prevents his mouth from being decidedly handsome, but the 
sweetest emanations of temper and of heart play about it when he talks cheer- 
fully, or smiles ; and, in company, he is much oftener gay than contem- 
plative. His conversation, an overflowing fountain of brilliant wit, appo- 
site allusion, and playful archness, while, on serious themes it is nervous 
and eloquent. The accent decidedly Scotch, yet by no means broad. On 
the whole no expectation is disappointed, which his poetry must excite m 
all who feel the powers and the graces of Aonian inspiration." 

Some parts of this description it is not in the poAver of ridicule to exag- 

* Why had he not a hump like Pope, sore eyes like Horace, and an 
asthma like Virgil ? May not Mr. Scott say with the satirist, 
** Go on obliging creatures — make me see, 
All that disgrae'd my betters met in me," 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 185 

However reluctant the reader may be to accord 
with Miss Seward in this opinion, he will perhaps 

gerate. Deep thought seated on a man's eye-lids, and gleams of genius 
darting sideways from the penthouse of a frown, are images so irresistibly 
burlesque, that I have never yet found one who could read them without 
merriment. Such slanting gleams might be expected from a man whose 
obliquity of vision rivalled that of the once celebrated John Wilkes. The 
description of his blooming complexion, his flaxen eye-brows, his grey 
eyes, and his pouting upper lip, forms, altogether, a picture so ludicrous, 
that no man would willingly have his portrait sketched in a similar way. 
It reminds the reader of a young girl in some novel, who is depicting, to 
some friend as sagacious as herself, the personal accomplishments of 
her lover. But here, the ludicrous is heightened by the recollection of the 
writer's age, her object, and her motive. 

Before I conclude this note, I am tempted to amuse my reader with an 
instance of profound erudition, for which he will be indebted to the pen of the 
Rev.Mr.Fellowes. I do not, by any means, wish to be considered as speaking 
with disrespect of that gentleman ; not because, as the conductor of the 
Critical Revieiv , he may retaliate by telling his readers that this is a worth- 
less production — a thing which, if done, will be done without the least 
concern on my part — but because I do consider him as a man of talent, 
and as the author of some valuable productions. He is one of Miss 
Seward's correspondents, and of course receives his full share of extrava- 
gant encomiums, especially in the letter which contains the passage I 
allude to. How he could waste one moment in penning a proposi- 
tion so idly self-evident, I am at a loss to conjecture. What should we 
think of a man who told us in a pompous, well-rounded period, that if pig* 
neither died nor were killed, there would soon be an accumulated popula- 
tion of them, and that either the young pigs must be killed, to make 
room for the old pigs, or the old pigs killed to make room for the young 
pigs ? Yet such is precisely the information contained in the following 
sentence from one of Mr. Fellowes' works, and which Miss Seward justly 
commends for its truth : 

" If the supposed increased durability of life," says Mr. F. " were the 
common privilege of all men, it is evident that the earth must soon teem 
■with an accumulated population ; and that either the young must be de- 
stroyed to leave room for the older, or the old to leave room for the young." 
And as if this were not simple enough, Mr. Scott adds, " It is equally evi- 
dent that, if mankind had not been born to die, a sphere of a thousand 
times the extent of the earth, could not have contained all who have been 



186 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

more willingly assent to some of those which she 
afterwards expresses. 

" There is an absurd attempt in his Observer, to 
ridicule that immortal and matchless imaginary 
history, the Clarissa, which Dr. Johnson pro- 
nounced not only the first novel, but perhaps the 
first work in this language*. 

" To the author of a little volume of very inge- 
nious essays, published by Cadell in 1788, and 
entitled Variety, I gave two numbers, which ex- 
posed the false reasoning of that invidious tract in 
the Observer. This history, which the author 
of that work gives of himself in a huge quarto vo- 
lume, contains a new attempt to tear the laurels 
from those glorious volumes. It has the effrontery 
to call their Grandison a nauseous pedant. And 
how Cumbey, as Johnson used to call him, writhes 

born since Adam's time. How much less then could the little garden of 
Eden !" (Vol VI. p. 239). Really such " laboured nothings in so grave a 
style" deserve to be stigmatised. 

Here I close this long note. I have expressed a very strong and unquali- 
fied disapprobation of Miss Seward's Letters, and I thought it but equit- 
able to advance some grounds for my censures. I cannot be certain that 
they will appear equally valid to others as to myself ; but of this I am cer- 
tain, that I am actuated by no sinister motive. Miss Seward I never saw ; 
with her I never corresponded ; from her pen I have received neither cen- 
sure nor praise. I read with an unprejudiced mind, and with an unpre- 
judiced mind I have declared my sentiments. They who differ from me 
will think me perhaps unreasonably fastidious; let them think me sincere, 
and I shall be contented. 

* When it suits this lady to corroborate her own sentiments by those of 
Dr. Johnson, how willingly she refers to him as an authority ; on all other 
occasions her malignity towards him is no less conspicuous than it is con- 
temptible. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 187 

under the fame of the young Roscius, and avows 
the mortification it cost him to see Master Betty, 
as in scorn he terms him, going to rehearsal in a 
coach that bore a ducal coronet ! 

" And, on my word, Cumbey slips his falcon 
at high game, inverse as well as in prose, since, 
with equal effrontery to his defamation of Richard- 
son, does he speak of Gray, whom Dr. Beattie 
justly pronounced next to Milton in the strength 
and grandeur of his muse. 

" Then, with what acrimony does he resent 
Mr. Hayley's testimony to an opinion universal in 
the learned world, of Dr. Bentley as a critic in 
English poetry. On what foundation that opinion 
stands, let Bentley's ridiculous edition of Milton, 
with its heap of absurd notes and presumptuous* 
alterations of the text, witness ! Surely every au- 
thor is free to speak his opinion of a deceased bro- 
ther ! If that opinion be unjust, let men of letters 
prove that injustice by reasons shewn ; but for a 
descendant of an arraigned author to take up the 
matter with resentment, and make it a family quar- 
rel, is ridiculous in the extreme. There are, how- 
ever, very amusing things in this selfish quarto — 
good characteristic portraits of Soame Jenyns, 
Foote, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Garrick ; and 
poor Cumbey was vilely treated by our govern- 
ment concerning that Spanish expedition. The 
violation of its engagement to him was utterly dis- 
honest and cruel, of which the official letters are 
proofs incontrovertible." 



18S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

To some of the opinions contained in the preced- 
ing extract, I shall have occasion to recur in the 
progress of this work ; but it is sufficiently proved 
by one part of it, that Cumberland's title to the 
original of Sheridan's portrait has been faithfully 
believed by many. 

In the ensuing year (1770) Cumberland paid his 
annual visit to his father, and while there he pro- 
jected, and partly composed, his comedy of the 
West Indian. The history of its production jus- 
tifies my remarks upon the folly of that mode of 
study which Cumberland boasts having adopted 
when he wrote the Brothers. Instead of writing in 
the midst of children he now seated himself in a 
little closet in his father's mansion, unfurnished 
and out of use, with only one window, and no 
prospect from that window but a turf-stack, with 
which it was almost in contact. 

This was now his plan : but surely it was incon- 
sistent with his former account, to declare, as he 
does at page 276 of his Memoirs, " that in all his 
hours of study it had been his object through life 
so to locate himself as to have little or nothing to 
distract his attention." I conceive there are few 
things more calculated to distract our attention 
than the babble of children, which he acknow- 
ledges he sometimes endured, while he was soli- 
citous to exclude the cheering and unobtrusive 
beauties of nature from his view at such times, by 
4C always avoiding pleasant prospects." 

In this closet his mother occasionally visited him, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 1S9 

and animated him with her remarks upon the pro- 
gress of his work, which went on felicitously, for 
every thing combined to render its author so. Re- 
moved from the bustle of office and its cares, 
from the intrusions of society and its temptations, 
and surrounded by his parents, sister, wife, and 
children, he beheld within his view all that a man 
can desire, whose views of happiness are founded 
upon a rational basis. Safe too from the malevo- 
lence of critics, and the competitions of rivalry, 
his mind was calm and concentrated to its pur- 
pose ; and he declares that at no other period 
of his life did the same happy circumstances com- 
bine to cheer him in any of his literary labours. 

In his poem of Retrospection he indulges in a 
pleasing vein of contemplation as he recals those 
moments of departed happiness, which he passed 
in the bosom of his family. It is short, and may 
be transcribed : 

But come, Oh Memory, bring thy volume forth, 

And let me see how many whiter days 

In years long past thy calendar can shew. 

Oh blest remembrances ! ye now unfold, 

And spread before me, scenes of young delight ; 

Stanwick's beloved mansion greets me now — 

I feel a mother's welcome fond embrace ; 

I see, I see a sainted father smile, 

List'ning indulgent to my school-boy tale— 

Oh stay delicious vision ! Vanish not 

So suddenly, ye dear parental shades. 

O leave not yet a son, who lov'd you ever, 

Obey'd you living, and bewail' d you dead ; 

Behold me now, how chang'd, how grey with years ! 

Stay then, and from my filial bosom draw 

These thorns that never would have rankled here 



90 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Had I, like you my father, humbly been 
The servant of my God, nor toil'd to earn 
The unpaid wages of a thankless world. 

Still, still by Retrospection's magic power, 

Though threescore years and ten have intervene, 

I'm wafted back to boyhood, and behold, 

To mental clear as to my nat'ral eye 

The honour'd form of Bentley. — At his desk 

Beside his garden window, deep in thought, 

With books embay'd, the learn'd master sits .• 

Unaw'd I run to him : around my neck 

He throws his arms ; methinks e'en now I feel 

Their pressure and his kiss upon my cheek : 

And lo ! at once the page of ancient lore, 

That offers no amusement to my sight 

Is shut, the golden chain of his bright thoughts 

Is snapt without a murmur — palsey struck 

And halting, see ! he rises from his chair^ 

And spreads before me what his shelves can show 

Of prints, to gratify an idle boy." 



There is a tender melancholy in this passage 
which wins its way to the reader's heart. It ex- 
hibits such remembrances as every man feels, and 
feels with greater fervency, as the rude collisions 
of the world remind him of what he has lost. 

If the memory of Cumberland were faithful, and 
that in writing his Memoirs he did not sometimes 
confound the notions of advanced life with what 
he conceived himself to have possessed when a 
younger man, it may be pronounced that he 
formed a very distinct and just conception of the 
province of a comic writer for the stage, when he 
himself meditated to assume that character. There 
is necessarilv, however, some uncertainty attached 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 191 

to the delivery of opinions at seventy, as those 
which we had when forty ; and he must have a 
more than ordinary power of discrimination who 
can venture to affirm that he knows precisely the 
chronology of his sentiments. The principles, 
however, laid down by Cumberland, are such as 
every writer may advantageously consult whpse 
ambition it is to live in the memory of succeeding 
generations. One praise which he assumes to 
himself no one will deny : that in all his dramas 
he has studiously avoided giving attractions to 
vice by rendering it so amiable that our detesta- 
tion of it is lost in admiring its more attractive 
qualities. This was the reproach of Congreve, 
Farquhar, and the dramatic writers of Charles 
the Second's reign : but it is a reproach from 
which Cumberland is wholly free. Transeat in 
exemplum ! 

During this visit to his father he experienced 
some adventures which it may not be unpleasing 
to give the reader in his own words, but I wish 
one part of them had been more befitting the 
gentleman and the scholar, than a main at cock- 
fighting. 

" During; an excursion of a few davs upon a 

O %/ i 

visit to Mr. Talbot of Mount Talbot, a very re- 
spectable and worthy gentleman in those parts, I 
found a kind of hermitage in his pleasure grounds, 
where I wrote some few scenes, and my amiable 
host was afterwards pleased to honour the 'thor 
of the West Indian with an inscription, afliA 



192 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

that building, commemorating the use that had 
been made of it ; a piece of elegant flattery very 
elegantly expressed. 

" On this visit to Mr. Talbot I was accompanied 
by Lord Eyre of Eyre Court, a near neighbour and 
friend of my father. This noble Lord, though 
pretty far advanced in years, was so correctly in- 
digenous, as never to have been out of Ireland in 
his life, and not often so far from Eyre Court as in 
this tour to Mr. Talbot's. Proprietor of a vast 
extent of soil, not very productive, and inhabiting 
a spacious mansion, not in the best repair, he lived 
according to the style of the country with more 
hospitality than elegance : whilst his table groaned 
with abundance, the order and good taste of its 
arrangement were little thought of: the slaughtered 
ox was hung up whole, and the hungry servitor 
supplied himself with his dole of flesh, sliced from 
off the carcase. His lordship's day was so ap- 
portioned as to give the afternoon by much the 
largest share of it, during which, from an early 
dinner to the hour of rest, he never left his chair, 
nor did the claret ever quit the table. This did 
not produce inebriety, for it was sipping rather 
than drinking, that filled up the time, and this 
mechanical process of gradually moistening the 
human clay was carried on with very little aid 
from conversation, for his lordship's companions 
were not very communicative, and fortunately he 
was not very curious. He lived in an enviable 
independence as to reading, and of course he had 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 193 

no books. Not one of the windows of his castle 
was made to open, but luckily he had no liking 
for fresh air, and the consequence may be better 
conceived than described. 

" He had a large and handsome pleasure boat on 
the Shannon, and men to row it ; I was of two or 
three parties with him on that noble water as far 
as to Pertumna, the then deserted castle of the 
Lord Clanrickarde. Upon one of these excursions 
we were hailed by a person from the bank, who 
somewhat rudely called to us to take him over to 
the other side. The company in the boat making 
no reply, I inadvertently called out — ' Aye, aye, 
Sir ! stay there till we come/ — Immediately I 
heard a murmur in the company, and Lord Eyre 
said to me — ' You'll hear from that gentleman 
again, or I am mistaken. You don't know perhaps 
that you have been answering one of the most 
irritable men alive, and the likeliest to interpret 
what you have said as an affront.' He predicted 
truly, for the very next morning the gentleman 
rode over to Lord Eyre, and demanded of him to 
give up my name. This his lordship did, but in- 
formed him withal that I was a stranger in the 
country, the son of Bishop Cumberland at Clon- 
fert, where I might be found, if he had any com- 
mands for me. He instantly replied, that he 
should have received it as an affront from any 
other man, but Bishop Cumberland's was a cha- 
racter he respected, and no son of his could be 

O 



19i< LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

guilty of an intention to insult him. Thus this 
valiant gentleman permitted me to live, and only 
helped me to another feature in my sketch of 
Major O'Flaherty. 

" A short time after this, Lord Eyre, who had 
a great passion for cock-fighting, and whose cocks 
were the crack* of all Ireland, engaged me in amain 
at Eyre Court. I was a perfect novice in that 
elegant sport, but the gentlemen from all parts 
sent me in their contributions, and having a good 
feeder I won every battle in the main but one. 
At this meeting I fell in with my hero from the 
Shannon bank. Both parties dined together, but 
when I found that mine, which was the more 
numerous and infinitely the most obstreperous 
and disposed to quarrel, could ho longer be left in 
peace with our antagonists, I quitted my seat by 
Lord Eyre and went to the gentle above-alluded 
to, who was presiding at the second table, and 
seating myself familiarly on the arm of his chair, 
proposed to him to adjourn our party, and assemble 
them in another house, for the sake of harmony 
and good fellowship. With the best grace in life 
he instantly assented, and when I added that I 
should put them under his care, and expect from 
him as a man of honour and my friend, that every 
mothers son of them should be found forthcoming 
and alive the next morning — 'Then by the soul 

* Cumberland was fond of this vulgarism. In his account of the West 
Indian's first appearance, he talks of the audience in the gallery " sending 
up a hearty crack." 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. \9o 

of me/ he replied, ' and they shall ; provided only 
that no man in company shall dare to give the glo- 
rious and immortal memory for his toast, which no 
gentleman, who feels as I do, will put up with/ 
To this I pledged myself, and we removed to a 
whiskey house, attended by half a score pipers, 
playing different tunes. Here we went on very 
joyously and lovingly for a time, till a well-dressed 
gentleman entered the room, and civilly accosting 
me, requested to partake of our festivity, and join 
the company, if nobody had an objection — c Ah 
now, don't be too sure of that/ a voice was in- 
stantly heard to reply, c I believe you will find 
plenty of objection in this company to your being 
one amongst us/ What had he done, the gen- 
tleman demanded- — ' What have vou done/ re- 
joined the first speaker, e Doi/t I know you for 
the miscreant, that ravished the poor wench against 
her will, in presence of her mother? And didn't 
your Pagans, that held her down, ravish the mo- 
ther afterwards, in presence of her daughter ? And 
do you think we will admityou into our company? 
Make yourself sure that we shall not ; therefore 
get out of this as speedily as you can, and away 
wid you !' Upon this the whole company rose, 
and in their rising the civil gentleman made his 
exit and was off. I relate this incident exactly 
as it happened, suppressing the name of the gen- 
tleman, who was a man of property and some 
consequence.- — When my surprise had subsided 

O 9 



196 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and the punch began to circulate with a rapidity 
the greater for this gentleman's having troubled 
the waters, I took my departure, having first cau- 
tioned a friend, who sate by me, (and the only 
protestant in the company) to keep his head cool 
and beware of the glorious memory; this gallant 
young officer, son to a man* who held lands of my 
father, promised faithfully to be sober and discreet, 
as well knowing the company he was in ; but my 
friend having forgot the first part of his promise, 
and getting very tipsy, let the second part slip out 
of his memory, and became very mad ; for stepping 
aside for his pistols, he re-entered the room, and 
laying them on the table, took the cockade from 
his hat, and dashed it into the punch-bowl, de- 
manding of the company to drink the glorious and 
immortal memory of King William in a bumper, 
or abide the consequences. I was not there, and 
if I had been present I could neither have stayed 
the tumult, nor described it. I onlv know he 
turned out the next morning merely for honour's 
sake, but as it was one against a host, the mag- 
nanimity of his opponents let him off with a shot 
or two, that did no execution. I returned to the 
peaceful family at Clonfert, and fought no more 
cocks. 

" The fairies were extremely prevalent at Clon- 
fert: visions of burials attended by long pro- 
cessions of mourners were seen to circle the church 
yard by night, and there was no lack of oaths and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 197 

attestations to enforce the truth of it. My mother 
suffered a loss by them of a large brood of fine 
turkies, who were every one burnt to ashes, bones 
and feathers, and their dust scattered in the air by 
their provident nurse and feeder to appease those 
mischievous little beings, and prevent worse con- 
sequences : the good dame credited herself very 
highly for this act of atonement, but my mother 
did not see it quite in so meritorious a light. 

" A few days after as m}^ father and I were 
riding in the grounds we crossed upon the Ca- 
tholic priest of the parish. My father began a 
conversation with him, and expressed a wish that 
he would caution his flock against this idle super- 
stition of the fairies : the good man assured the 
bishop that in the first place he could not do it 
if he would ; and in the next place confessed that 
he was himself far from beino* an unbeliever in their 
existence. My father thereupon turned the 
subject, and observed to him with concern, that 
his steed was a very sorry one, and in very 
wretched condition — ' Truly, my good lord/ he 
replied, ' the beast himself is but an ugly garron, 
and whereby I have no provender to spare him, 
mightily out of heart, as I may truly say ; but 
your lordship must think a poor priest like me has 
a mighty deal of work and very little pay — ' 6 Why 
then, brother/ said my good father, whilst bene- 
volence beamed in his countenance, ' 'tis fit that 
I, who have the advantage of you in both respects, 
should mount you on a better horse, and furnish 



198 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

you with provender to maintain him — .' This 
parley with the priest passed in the very hay-field, 
where the bishop's people were at work ; orders 
were instantly given for a stack of hay to be made 
at the priest's cabin, and in a few days after a 
steady horse was purchased and presented to him. 
Surely they could not be true born Irish fairies, 
that would spite my father, or even his turkies, 
after this. 

" Amongst the labourers in my father's garden 
there were three brothers of the name of O'Rourke, 
regularly descended from the kings of Connaught, 
if they were exactly to be credited for the cor- 
rectness of their genealogy. — There was also an 
elder brother of these, Thomas O'Rourke, who 
filled the superior station of hind, or headman; it 
was his wife that burnt the bewitched turkies, 
whilst Tom burnt his wig for joy of my victory at 
the cock-match, and threw a proper parcel of 
oatmeal into the air as a votive offering for my 
glorious success. One of the younger brothers 
was upon crutches in consequence of a contusion 
on nis hip, which he literally acquired as follows — 
When my father came down to Clonfert from 
Dublin, it was announced to him that the bishop 
was arrived : the poor fellow was then in the act 
of lopping a tree in the garden ; transported at the 
tidings, he exclaimed — ' Is my lord come ? Then 
I'll throw myself out of this same tree for joy — .' 
He exactly fulfilled his word, and laid himself up 
for some months. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 199 

C| When I accompanied my mother from Clon- 
fert to Dublin, my father having gone before, we 
passed the night at Killbeggan, where Sir Thomas 
CufTe, (knighted in a frolic by Lord Townshend) 
kept the inn. A certain Mr. Geoghegan was ex- 
tremely drunk, noisy and brutally troublesome to 
Lady Cuffe the hostess : Thomas O'Rourke was 
with us, and being much scandalised with the 
behaviour of Geoghegan, took me aside, and in a 
whisper said — ' Squire, will I quiet this same Mr. 
Geoghegan V When I replied by all means, but 
how was it to be done ? — Tom produced a knife of 
formidable length, and demanded — c Haven't I got 
this? And won't this do the job, and hasn't he 
wounded the woman of the inn with a chopping 
knife, and what is this but a knife, and wouldn't it 
be a good deed to put him to death like a mad dog? 
Therefore, Squire, do you see, if it will pleasure 
you and my lady there above stairs, who is ill 
enough, God he knows, I'll put this knife into that 
same Mr. Geoghegan's ribs, and be off the next 
moment on the grey mare ; and isn't she in the 
stable ? Therefore only say the word, and I'll do 
it.' This was the true and exact proposal of 
Thomas O'Rodrke, and as nearly as I can re- 
member, I have stated it in his very words. 

" We arrived safe in Dublin, leaving Mr. 
Geoghegan to get sober at his leisure, and dis- 
missing O'Rourke to his quarters at Clonfert. 
When we had passed a few days in Kildare-Street, 
I well remember the surprise it occasioned us one 



200 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

afternoon, when without any notice we saw a 
great gigantic dirty fellow walk into the room, and 
march straight up to my father for what purpose 
we could not devise. My mother uttered a scream, 
whilst my father with perfect composure addressed 
him by the name of Stephen, demanding what he 
wanted with him, and what brought him to Dub- 
lin- — ' Nay, my good lord,' replied the man, ' I 
have no other business in Dublin itself but to take 
a bit of a walk up from Clonfert to see your sweet 
face, long life to it, and to beg a blessing upon me 
from your lordship; that is all/ So saying he 
flounced down on his knees, and in a most piteous 
kind of howl, closing his hands at the same time 
cried out — ■' Pray, my lord, pray to God to bless 
Stephen Costello- — .' The scene was sufficiently 
ludicrous to have spoiled the solemnity, yet my 
father kept his countenance, and gravely gave his 
blessing, saying as he laid his hands on his head 
— c God bless you, Stephen Costello, and make 
you a good boy !■ The giant sung out a loud 
amen, and arose, declaring he should immediately 
set out and return to his home. He would ac- 
cept no refreshment, but with many thanks and a 
thousand blessings in recompence for the one he 
had received, walked out of the house, and I can 
well believe resumed his pilgrimage to the west- 
ward without stop or stay. I should not have 
considered this and the preceding anecdotes as 
worth recording, but that they are in some degree 
characteristic of a very curious and peculiar people* 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 201 

who are not often understood by those who profess 
to mimic them, and who are too apt to set them 
forth as objects for ridicule only, when oftentimes 
even their oddities, if candidly examined, would 
entitle them to our respect. 

" I will here mention a very extraordinary ho- 
nour, which the city of Dublin was pleased to 
confer upon my father in presenting him with his 
freedom in a gold box ; a form of such high respect 
as they had never before observed towards any 
person below the rank of their chief governor ; I 
state this last-mentioned circumstance from au- 
thorities that ought not to be mistaken; if the fact 
is otherwise, I have been misinformed, and the 
honour conferred upon the bishop of Clonfert was 
not without a precedent. The motives assigned 
in the deed, which accompanied the box, are in 
general for the great respectability of his character, 
and in particular for his disinterested protection of 
the Irish clergy. Under this head it was supposed 
they alluded to the benefice, which he had be- 
stowed upon a most deserving clergyman, his own 
particular friend and chaplain, the Reverend Dixie 
Blondel, who happened also to be at that time 
chaplain to the Lord Mayor of Dublin. I have 
the box at this time in my possession/' 



202 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 



CHAP. IX. 

Cumberland returns to England, and offers his 
West Indian to Garrick. — It is accepted and 
performed. — History of its success. — Criticisms 
upon it by Lord Lyttleton and Lord Clare. — 
Observations upon its fable, characters, and Ian- 
guage. — Belcour. — Major O' Flaherty not skil- 
fully drawn. — Inferior to the delineations of Irish 
character by Colman and Miss Edgeworth. — 
Ungrammatical construction of the language. — 
Mrs. Inchbald* s mode of criticism. 

When Cumberland returned to England, his first 
step was to offer the West Indian to Garrick, with 
some confidence as to its fate, remembering the 
incident of the " immortal actor/' Immortal as 
he was in his talents, he was mortal in his passions : 
no man deserved praise more than he did ; no man 
received it in larger portions : and no man sought 
it withrmore voracity. His vanity had a stomach 
that could swallow whatever was offered : with a 
mind formed to delight in the judicious commenda- 
tion of the discerning few, it was no less capable 
of battening on the gross and undistinguishing 
panegyric of the multitude: nay, such was his 
eagerness to be applauded, that he did not always 
observe whether the applause was the genuine 
offspring of admiration, or the lure of self-interest 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 203 

by which he was to be entrapped for some ser- 
vice : as in the well known instance of Mallet, 
who amused him with the phantom of a conspi- 
cuous mention in the life of Marlborough, and 
thus opened an avenue for his Alfred to appear on 
the stage. It may be supposed, therefore, that 
the dextrous eulogy bestowed upon him by Cum- 
berland had some share in disposing his mind to a 
favourable reception of whatever he might after- 
wards tender. 

But he did not confine himself merely to a favour- 
able reception of the West Indian. He did more ; 
and he did what shewed that he at least wished its 
success, while it proved, also, the docility with 
which the author adopted whatever was proposed 
to him as a means likely to ensure that success. 
Many alterations were suggested and improvements 
proposed in the course of frequent interviews be- 
tween him and Cumberland ; his hints were scru- 
pulously followed, and it may be inferred, there- 
fore, that the West Indian owes some of that 
excellence which it now displays, to the friendship 
of Garrick. 

In the interval between its acceptance and re- 
presentation, Cumberland's opinion of its merits 
seems to have been so very slender, (for I presume 
he anticipated success as the necessary conse- 
quence of merit), that he offered to give its 
eventual produce to Garrick, for a picture in his 



204 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

possession, a copy from a Holy Family of Andreo 
del Sarto : and the bargain would have been con- 
cluded had not Garrick happened to set a par- 
ticular value upon the picture as the gift of Lord 
Baltimore. 

On the first night of its performance, the audi- 
ence assembled with intentions hostile to its pros- 
perity. It had been rumoured, from the title of 
the piece, that it contained some satirical strokes 
against the West Indians, and numbers of those 
who conceived that they were to be ridiculed un- 
der this appellation, repaired to the theatre with a 
resolution to rescue themselves from the antici- 
pated indignity. 

When the first lines of the prologue were 
spoken, the tumult began to shew itself. All was 
uproar and confusion ; Garrick, who was sitting in 
his own box with the author, remarked, that he had 
never seen such decided indications of a turbulent 
disposition in an audience, and drew the most un- 
favourable conclusions as to the success of the 
play. Cumberland was not impressed with the 
same terrors; he trusted to the actual scope and 
intention of his drama, and believed that when 
they saw his views were honourable they would 
give him honourable reception. 

His conjecture was the right one. Silence was 
enforced, and the actor ordered to re-commence 
the prologue ; it was now suffered to proceed till 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 205 

it came to the line where they were told to expect 
from the chief character of the play, 

" Some emanations of a noble mind." 

This, if it did not quiet their fears, gave them 
reasonable motives for awaiting the developement 
of the piece, and they remained without offering 
any further interruption ; ready for peace or war, 
according as they were soothed or provoked. 

The success of this play I need not tell. Every 
murmur of disapprobation was silenced before the 
curtain dropped, and the author retired from the 
field flushed with the honours of victory. It en- 
countered some opposition from the critics indeed, 
and Garrick stood forth in its defence : but their 
cavils had not power to turn aside the current of 
popularity ; the public opinion was fixed, and the 
town crowded for eight and twenty successive 
nights, to behold its representation. 

The rumours of fame, however, were not all that 
gladdened the imagination of Cumberland. Mr. 
Evans, the treasurer of the theatre, arrived at his 
house in a coach, with " a huge bag of money/ ' 
and spread before his wondering eyes the shining 
heap, which, uniting its own substantial qualities 
to the airy and immaterial ones of renown, com- 
pounded together such a real and visible reward 
as every author desires, but does not always get. 

In addition to this, he sold the copy-right for 
150/. to Griffin in Catherine-street, who had no 



206 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

reason to regret his purchase, for he boasted of 
having vended 12,000 copies of it. In this state- 
ment, however, I suspect there is some exagge- 
ration. 

While the author was wantoning in the exu- 
berance of his good fortune, Garrick was ma- 
liciously preparing a slight antidote for him ; 
something that would obscure, with a momen- 
tary gloom, the cloudless azure of his mind. 
Cumberland called upon him one morning, 
" and found him with the St. James's even- 
ing paper in his hand, which he began to read 
with a voice and action of surprise, most admira- 
bly counterfeited, as if he had discovered a mine 
under his feet, and a train to blow him up to de- 
struction. ' Here, here/ he cried, ' if your skin 
is less thick than a rhinoceros's hide, egad, 
here is that will cut you to the bone. This is a 
terrible fellow ; I wonder who it can be ?' He 
began to sing out* his libel in a high declamatory 
tone, with a most comic countenance, and pausing 
at the end of the first sentence, which seemed to 
favour his contrivance for a little ingenious tor- 
menting, when he found he had hooked him, he 
laid down the paper, and began to comment upon 
the cruelty of newspapers, and moan over him 
with a great deal of malicious fun and good hu- 
mour. ' Confound these fellows, they spare no- 

* A vulgar mode of expression which Cumberland to© often employ?. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 207 

body. I dare say this is Bickerstaff again ; but 
you don't mind him ; no, no, I see you don't mind 
him ; a little galled, but not much hurt; you may 
stop his mouth with a golden gag, but we'll see 
how he goes on.' He then resumed his reading, 
cheering him all the way as it began to soften, till 
it wound up in the most professed panegyric, of 
which he was himself the writer." 

It was thus that Garrick had his joke, which to 
be comprehended must have been seen ; and it was 
thus, I suppose, that he repaid the compliment of 
Cumberland in the prologue to the Brothers. 

These, however, were but fictitious objections 
to his play ; but Lord Lyttleton started one that 
had all the weight of truth to recommend it. This 
took place one evening at Mrs. Montague's, when 
his lordship observed to Cumberland, that the 
expedient of sending 0' Flaherty behind the scene 
to listen, was one equally repugnant to the nature 
of true comedy, and to the avowed feelings of ho- 
nour by which every gentleman is supposed to be 
influenced. Cumberland scarcely sought to vin- 
dicate the incident, for his politeness so far outrun 
his judgment that he ventured to inform his lord- 
ship, " no precedent could justify any thing which 
his better judgment had condemned ;" but. as he 
could not remove the offending scene without a 
greater alteration in other parts than was thought 
prudent, he qualified its obnoxious character by 
introducing the clause in the Major's speech, 



208 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 

" that a good soldier must sometimes fight in am- 
bush as well as in the open field/' 

Lord Nugent also played the critic upon this 
drama. He condemned the five wives of O'Fla- 
herty, as a violent outrage upon morality. To this 
censure Cumberland listened with equal docility ; 
and his lordship's delicacy was propitiated by a 
lucky suggestion of Moody, who played the part, 
and who avowed his polygamy with the salvo of 
en militaire; a soldier being supposed to have a 
privilege of possessing as many wives as he can 
seduce, and more than he can keep. Davies, in 
his life of Garrick, says that this qualifying phrase 
was adopted by Moody, from his own persuasion 
of its necessity ; but I should suppose Cumber- 
land more likely to know the truth. 

Of this comedy, thus auspiciously presented to 
the world, I will now give that opinion which a 
very frequent observation of it on the stage, and 
a recent perusal, have enabled me to form. 

I am not prepared to affirm that it is the 
best of Cumberland's plays, because I think his 
Jew, his Fashionable Lover, and his Wheel of 
Fortune entitled to contend that claim with it. 
It is, undoubtedly, however, a very good comedy, 
and bears internal evidence of that study and 
retirement which, being denied to The Brothers, 
rendered it so inferior a production. The scenes 
are not so incoherently abrupt as in that and 
some other of the author's dramas ; they are harmo- 
nised with more skill, being dismissed neither with 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 209 

unsatisfying brevity, nor protracted into languid 
prolixity. They succeed each other without any 
violation of dramatic probability ; and hasten on 
the action by means which appear natural, be- 
cause not produced by the Jidt of the author, but 
by the course of the events themselves. This is a 
praise which cannot always be given to the plays 
of Cumberland. 

The plot is pleasingly intricate, though I have 
always thought that much of its interest was de- 
stroyed by the premature disclosure of Stockwell's 
paternity in relation to Belcour ; that agreeable 
surprise which the author might have advan- 
tageously reserved till the developement of the 
action is thrown away without any equivalent. 
Had this been avoided, I know nothing that could 
have been added to render the argument of the 
play completely excellent. 

Of the characters, Belcour & is the most promi- 
nent, and the most laboured. In him the author 
concentrated his chief efforts to please, and he at- 
tained what he wished. Belcour is a man such as 
the world often presents ; a man whose passions are 
sometimes too strong for his virtue, but whose 
virtue is never wholly destroyed. Benevolent and 
impetuous, he forgets that justice is paramount to 
generosity, and gives away the property of another 
with the same indifference and with greater culpa- 
bility than he would squander his own. He has 

P 



21X) LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

all the turbulent qualities of youth, and some of 
its amiable inconsistencies ; incautious in giv- 
ing offence, but quick in resenting it, and as 
quick in meeting a generous offer of reconciliation 
when his honour has been duly propitiated. Such 
is Belcour^ and such as he is, he never fails to 
command the good- will both of the spectator and the 
reader. Why he is made a West Indian^ however, 
I am unable to conjecture. No quality is given 
to him which might not belong to a European, 
and those qualities which would have distin- 
guished him, in conformity with his appellation, 
are withheld. 

Of Charlotte Rusport I think as Mrs. Abington 
thought when she accepted the part ; it is a sketch 
and not a character. The same may be said of 
Louisa Dudley. They are interesting however. 

The other personages require no comment, if 
Major OFlaherty be excepted. What the au- 
thor's intentions were in delineating this character 
he has himself told us. He put him into the 
Austrian service to remind the public that an Irish 
Catholic is the victim of penal disabilities; but I 
hope, if those disabilities are ever removed, they 
will be removed, not precipitately, but with deep 
and patient consideration of probable and possible 
consequences. He gave him courage, for it be- 
longs to his nation ; a proposition to which I wil- 
lingly accede. " I endowed him with honour," 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 211 

he continues, " for it belongs to his profession, 
and I made him proud, jealous, susceptible, for 
such the exiled veteran will be, who lives by the 
earnings of his sword, and is not allowed to draw 
it in the service of that country which gave him 
birth, and which of course he was born to defend ; 
for his phraseology I had the glossary ready at 
hand ; for his mistakes and trips, vulgarly called 
bulls, I. did not know the Irishman of the stage 
then existing, whom I would wish to make my 
model ; their gross absurdities, and unnatural con- 
trarieties have not a shade of character in them. 
When his imagination is warmed, and his ideas 
rush upon him in a cluster, 'tis then the Irish- 
man will sometimes blunder ; his fancy having 
supplied more words than his tongue can well dis- 
pose of, it will occasionally trip. But the imita- 
tion must be delicately conducted ; his meaning is 
clear, he conceives rightly, though in delivery he 
is confused : and the art, as I conceive it, of find- 
ing language for the Irish character on the stage, 
consists not in making him foolish, vulgar, or ab- 
surd, but on the contrary, while you furnish him 
with expressions that excite laughter, you must 
graft them upon sentiments that deserve ap- 
plause." ' 

To establish the rules by which a thing may be 
well performed, and to perform it well, do not 
always belong to the same person. The power to 

P2 



212 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

conceive is often much stronger than the power to 
execute, for a man may imagine a character which 
he cannot afterwards depict. His notions may be 
drawn from a judgment speculatively accurate; 
but they may not be enforced by a practice equally 
accurate; and in this predicament I consider Cum- 
berland to stand with respect to Major O'Flaherty. 
His idea of what the Irish character should be, 
dramatically, is just ; but I do not think he has 
made O' Flaherty that Irishman which, in fancy, 
he perceived to be his perfect delineation. He 
seldom speaks either the language or the senti- 
ments of his countrymen; but is made to utter 
a dialect which belongs neither to England nor 
Ireland, for an Irish gentleman is in no respect 
distinguishable from an English one, or if there 
be any distinction, it is perhaps in favour of the 
former : but a plebeian Irishman is an animal dis- 
tinct from all the rest of mankind. 

When Cumberland, therefore, made his charac- 
ter an officer, he made him a gentleman by impli- 
cation, and in giving him the stage cant of the Irish- 
man, he gave him what I do not think he could 
easily have found in Ireland. Refinement and 
education give to the higher classes of society a 
character nearly uniform ; it is only the lower that 
are discriminated by habits which each man 
adopts, according to his own notions of what is 
excellent. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 213 

Cumberland, I believe, was the first who at- 
tempted to introduce the Irish gentleman on the 
stage, but the attempt may be considered as unsuc- 
cessful, for the national diversity is not marked by 
lines of sufficient distinctness to strike the fancy. 
I suppose there is no reader who does not prefer 
the delineations of the Irish character, by Colman, 
and Miss Edgeworth to the O'Flaherty of Cum- 
berland ; and I believe no one doubts that they 
are more faithfully copied from nature. Miss 
Edgeworth's, indeed, are beyond all praise. 

The language of this comedy is, in general, ele- 
gant and suitable to the characters ; but it is not 
always so correct as it ought to be. I have ob- 
served, indeed, (and shall have frequent occasion 
to notice it in the course of this work) that Cum- 
berland is often inexcusably negligent in the gram- 
matical construction of his sentences. Comedy, 
as an exhibition of real life, is more or less perfect 
as it approaches more or less to that which real life 
presents. This, at least, may be said of the man- 
ners ; but in the diction the author is to consider 
not how his characters would speak, but how, 
according to their respective qualities, they ought 
to speak. Thus a chambermaid may be allowed 
to use double negatives and double comparatives ; 
but her mistress should speak a language purified 
from all such errors, as it is presumed she re- 
presents an individual of education and good- 
breeding. 



214 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

To this distinction, however, Cumberland was 
never sufficiently attentive, but puts such modes 
of expression into the mouths of his ladies and 
gentlemen as would incur a reprimand in the 
theme of a school-boy. Thus, in this play, where 
the language, in all other respeets, is so scrupu- 
lously polished, I find such errors as, " Was I 
only a visitor/' (Act I. Sc. V.J. — " Was^ 1 to 
chuse a pupil," (ib.)—" You was brought up," 
(Act I. Sc. VI. J — " You was about to join your 
regiment," (Act II. Sc. I.J Both these forms 
of construction are invariably used, though there 
is hardly an attorney's clerk who would not avoid 
such gross mistakes, even in familiar conver- 
sation. 

Before I dismiss this play from my notice, I 
must be permitted to observe upon the curious 
method of ascertaining it's author's merits employed 
by Mrs. Inchbald. After some prefatory remarks, 
which relate more to the history of the drama 
than to its excellencies or defects, she concludes by 
quoting the following letter from the Spectator : 

" Mr. Spectator, 

" Be so kind as to let me know what you esteem 
to be the chief qualification of a good poet, espe- 
cially of one who writes plays ?" 

To this a very silly answer was returned, viz. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 215 

" To be a well-bred man :" and Mrs. Inchbald 
heightens its absurdity by this inference : 

" On this position — Mr. Cumberland is a man 
of perfect good breeding/ ' 

If there be any wit or ingenuity of applica- 
tion in this which I cannot find out, let my dull- 
ness bear the fault. If it be criticism let those 
profit by it who think it such. 



216 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. X. 

Cumberland enters the path of controversy. — Writes 
against Bishop Lowth . — Reflections upon the 
freedom of discussing the merits of literary men. 
• — He loses a present which was sent to his uncle 
as the presumed author of the tract. — Writes to 
the donor. — Made the heir of a distant relation. — 
Disappointed ultimately. — Cumberland's own 
account of this curious transaction. 

Justly proud of the literary honours of his race, 
Cumberland was no less tenacious of their reputa- 
tion. As their descendant, he considered himself 
obliged, by the ties of consanguinity, no less than 
by a principle of veneration common to every man 
who reveres the memory of his ancestors, to watch, 
with a jealous eye, over their posthumous renown, 
and to stand forth as their champion against any 
daring hand that should strive to tarnish the laurels 
they had won. 

But every virtue may be carried to excess, and 
it may perhaps be thought that Cumberland's 
reverential solicitude for the literary character of 
Bentley, degenerated into captiousness. Cer- 
tainly, a dead author is the legitimate prey of every 
living one ; and it seems a morbid delicacy of feel- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 217 

Ing to rouse at every attack which the celebrity of 
a man draws upon him. Bentley's, indeed, was a 
character more calculated to provoke hatred and fear 
than to conciliate esteem or affection : and it might 
be supposed that he who had assaulted his antago- 
nists with a coarseness too often disgraceful to let- 
ters, would find opponents as willing and as capa- 
ble to encounter him with the same weapon. It is 
the common fate of arrogance to excite enemies: 
every man is eager to pull him down, who vaunts 
too loudly when he is up, even though there be 
ability to countenance the haughtiness by which 
it is degraded. 

Cumberland must have known that whatever 
domestic benevolence belonged to the character of 
his grandfather, there was very little of literary 
courtesy in it ; and he must also have known 
enough of human nature to conclude that a man 
who treated, with excessive rudeness, all who 
differed from him in opinion, would sometimes 
find as little politeness as he shewed. Why then 
was he, on all occasions, so incensed against 
those who presumed to speak of Bentley in a man- 
ner which he considered as disrespectful ? Why 
did he claim for him a privilege whose authority 
was never acknowledged by Bentley himself? 
This alone gives an air of ridicule to his vehement 
declamations: but the principle itself is, perhaps, 
still less to be defended. If there were now a lineal 
descendant of Shakspeare in the literary world, 



218 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

surely we should but smile if he were to attack 
his commentators with all the acrimony of pious 
zeal, and intemperately censure those who dared 
to censure his illustrious ancestor. This would 
be a species of immunity unknown in the republic 
of letters, where every man enjoys a perfect free- 
dom of opinion as long as the moral character re- 
mains untouched, and where all who distinguish 
themselves, tacitly invite the rest of mankind to 
applaud or condemn them as they choose. 

If I may judge from Cumberland's practice, 
however, he considered both dead and living au- 
thors (including himself and family) as sacred, and 
their merits not to be agitated by the rude breath 
of criticism. He seems to have been equally sen- 
sible of any attack, whether directed towards the 
controversial asperity of Bentley, or to his own dra- 
mas ; and to have lived in perpetual dread of that 
power whose decrees he affected to despise. The 
probability of this, with regard to himself, I shall 
have occasion to discuss hereafter ; but his pam- 
phlet addressed to Lowth, and his controversy 
with Mr. Hayley sufficiently prove it with respect 
to Bentley. 

Lowth had taken occasion, in a tract which he 
wrote professedly against Warburton, to stigmatise 
the character of Bentley. Cumberland considered 
this as an unnecessary aggression, being foreign to 
the object of the work, and meditated to avenge 
the insult. The reader must smile, however, as 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 219 

he contemplates his notions of forbearance. " The 
bishop/' says he, " is now dead, and I will not 
use his name irreverently ;" of course, when, 
only a few lines before, he denominates his pam- 
phlet " unepiscopally intemperate in the highest 
degree," accuses him of going out of his course 
" to hurl dust upon the coffin of Bentley," and 
afterwards arraigns him of " downright black- 
guardism/' as well as of indulging in acrimonious 
censure " till his lawn-sleeves were bloody," (no 
very delicate or elegant metaphor), he considered 
those gentle modes of reproof as the very essence 
of a reverential regard for a deceased antagonist. 
Surely, when Lowth called Bentley aut caprhnul- 
gus aut fossor, (the dire offence for which his de- 
scendant took up arms against him), the attack 
was not much coarser than the one I have just 
exhibited, perpetrated under the very avowal of 
mildness and civility. Perhaps, indeed, the bi- 
shop's was the least offensive, as it was veiled in 
the obscurity of a learned language. 

Cumberland, however, believed the cause a 
sacred one, and he listened to its call with alacrity. 
The son of Bentley was yet living, to whom, as he 
stood nearer in relationship to the traduced critic, 
he thought the task of defending him more pro- 
perly belonged, and he therefore submitted to his 
acceptance the post of honour. He declined the 
task (perhaps because he considered it one of use- 
less tendency) and begged that Cumberland, in 



220 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

adopting it, would so conduct the proposed attack 
that it might not be mistaken for his ; a request 
not very indicatory of much estimation for the 
undertaking. Cumberland promised to designate 
himself in such a manner as should leave no room 
for doubt, and then vigorously commenced his 
operations. 

The pamphlet soon grew to a considerable size, 
and was published with the following involved and 
confused title : " A Letter to the Right Rev. the 
Lord Bishop of O d, containing some animad- 
versions upon a character given of the late Dr. 
Bentley, in a Letter from a late Professor in the 
University of Oxford, to the Right Reverend Au- 
thor of the Divine Legation of Moses demon- 
strated/' 

This was the motto : 

Jam parce stpulto. 

The pamphlet had some success, for it went 
through " two full editions," but Lowth never con- 
descended to notice it by any reply. His silence, 
which might aptly be construed into contempt, 
Cumberland asserts to have arisen from a consci- 
ousness of its justice, for he had occasion to 
know that he refused the voluntary services of a 
clergyman who offered to fight his lordship's bat- 
tles, by observing that the retaliation was equita- 
ble, and that it would be better to let it pass with- 
out reply. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 221 

This pamphlet I have never seen, and therefore 
can say no more of it than what its author has 
communicated. Pie selects from it the following 
passage, as an attack which he considers to be 
" fairly pressed? upon Lowth, and in which 
opinion the reader will probably concur. 

" Recollect, my lord, the warmth, the piety, 
with which you remonstrated against Bishop 

W 's treatment of your father, in a passage of 

his Julian : — c It is not, you therein say, in behalf 
of myself that I expostulate, but of one for whom I 
am much more concerned, that is my father.' 
These are your lordship's words — amiable, affect- 
ing expression ! instructive lesson of filial devo- 
tion ! alas, my lord, that you who were thus sensible 
to the least speck which fell upon the reputation of 
your father, should be so inveterate against the 
fame of one at least as eminent, and perhaps not 
less dear to his family/' 

These are, indeed, arguments ad hominem, but 
I do not know that they invalidate the principle of 
the attack which Lowth made upon Bentley. 

His uncle's desire not to be mistaken for the 
author of this letter, was amply gratified, except 
in the instance of one old gentleman, whose mis- 
conception was the occasion of a handsome gra- 
tuity to him as the presumed defender of Bentley. 
This gentleman was Mr. Commissary Greaves, of 
Fulborne, in Cambridgeshire, who had a great 
affection for the memory of Bentley, and was, as 



222 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Cumberland believed, indebted to him for some 
essential services. Supposing the son of his de- 
ceased friend and benefactor, to have been the au- 
thor of the letter to Lovvth, he not only compli- 
mented the writing, but sent a valuable present to 
him as the writer. 

This present Cumberland seems to have regretted 
the loss of, conceiving it but fair, that he who en- 
dured all the labour and incurred all the peril, 
should receive all the reward ; and when he heard of 
the unfortunate misapprehension, he despatched a 
letter to the old gentleman, in which it is amusing to 
see the artifice with which its real object is endea- 
voured to be concealed while it seems to be merely 
a complimentary epistle. The thoughts of the dona- 
tion were still floating before the writer's fancy, 
and he ingeniously strives to remind the giver, that 
he who deserved it did not get it. 

For the reader's gratification I will transcribe 
this letter. 

" Dear Sir, 
" When in the warmth of your affection for the 
memory of my grandfather, you could praise a 
pamphlet written by me, and address your praises 
to my uncle, as supposing him to be the author of 
it, I am more flattered by your mistake than I will 
attempt to express to you. You have ever been so 
good to me, that had your commendations been di- 
rected rightly, I must have ascribed the greater 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 223 

share of them to your charitable interpretation of 
my zeal, and the rest I should have placed to the 
account of your politeness. 

" When I was an under graduate at Trinity Col- 
lege, you was so obliging as to let me be informed 
of your intention to encourage and assist me in 
my studies ; and though circumstances at that 
time intervened*, to postpone your kind design, 
you have so abundantly overpaid me, that I have 
no greater ambition now at heart than that I may 
continue so to write as to be mistaken for my 
uncle, and you so to approve of what you read, 
as to see fresh cause of applauding him, who is so 
truly deserving of every favour you can bestow. 

" I have the honour to be, &c." 
" To William Greaves^ Esq. Fulbome." 

It does not appear that Mr. Greaves understood 
the hint, or if he understood it, he did not proba- 
bly think himself bound to shew that he did. It 
is evident, however, that Cumberland thought 
himself (and justly it must be confessed) the legi- 
timate object of his bounty. 

Nor was this the only instance in which an 
intended beneficence was frustrated between 
the first conception and the final act. When 

* This intended encouragement consisted of a proposed present of books, 
^o the amount of twenty pounds ; but a wet season took place ; bis fen lands 
were under water ; and Cumberland went without his books. He remind* 
him, however, that such a thing 1 was once thought of. 



2%4> LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the West Indian had made him popular, he was 
selected by a distant relation as his heir, and the 
testator waited upon him personally, to assure him 
of his intentions. The commencement and con- 
clusion of this curious business shall be given in 
Cumberland's own words. 

" I was surprised one morning, at an early hour, 
by a visit from an old clergyman, the Rev. Deci- 
mus Reynolds. I knew there was such a person 
in existence, and that he was the son of Bishop 
Reynolds by my father's aunt, and of course his 
first cousin, but I had never seen him to my 
knowledge in my life, and he came now at an hour 
when I was so particularly engaged, that I should 
have denied myself to him, but that he had called 
once or twice before, and been disappointed of 
seeing me. I had my office papers before me, and 
my wife was making my tea, that I might get down 
to Whitehall in time for my business, and the 
coach was waiting at the door. He was shewn 
into the room ; a more uncouth person, habit and 
address, was hardly to be met with ; he advanced, 
stopt, and stood staring with his eyes fixed upon 
me for some time, when, putting his hand into a 
pocket in the lining of the breast of his coat, he 
drew out an old packet of paper rolled up and tied 
with whip-cord, and very ceremoniously de- 
sired me to peruse it. I begged to know what it 
was ; for it was a work of time to unravel the 
knots — he replied— " My will." And what am I 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 295 

to do with your will, Sir? — ' My heir—' Wei], 
Sir, and who is your heir ? (I really did not un- 
derstand him — c Richard Cumberland — look at 
the date- — left it to you twenty years ago — my 
whole estate—- real and personal — come to town 
on purpose— brought up my title deeds — put them 
into your hands — sign a deed of gift, and make 
them over to you hard and fast.' 

" All this while I had not looked at his will ; I 
did not know he had any property, or, if he had, 
I had no guess where it laid, nor did 1 so much as 
know whereabouts he lived. In the mean time he 
delivered himself in so strange a style, by starts and 
snatches, with long pauses and strong sentences, 
that I suspected him to be deranged, and I saw, by 
the expression of my wife's countenance, that she 
w r as under the same suspicion also. — I now cast 
my eye upon the will ; I found my name there as 
his heir, under a date of twenty years past ; it was 
therefore no sudden caprice, and I conjured him to 
tell me if he had any cause ot' quarrel or displeasure 
with his nearer relations. Upon this he sate 
down, took some time to compose himself, for he 
had been greatly agitated, and having recovered 
his spirits, answered me deliberately and calmly, 
that he had no immediate matter of offence with 
his relations, but he had no obligations to them of 
any sort, and had been entirely the founder of his 
own fortune, which by marriage he had acquired, 
and by economy improved. I stated to him that 

Q 



226 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

my friend and cousin Mr. Richard Reynolds, of 
Paxton, in Huntingdonshire, was his natural heir, 
and a man of most unexceptionable worth and 
good character : he did not deny it, but he was 
wealthy and childless, and he had bequeathed it 
to me, as his will would testify, twenty years ago, 
as being the representative of the maternal branch 
of his family ; in fine he required of me to accom- 
pany him to my conveyancer, and and direct a po- 
sitive deed of gift to be drawn up, for which pur- 
pose he had brought his title deeds with him, and 
should leave them in my hands. He added, in fur- 
ther vindication of his motives, that my father had 
been ever his most valued friend, that he had con- 
stantly watched my conduct, and scrutinised my 
character, although he had not seen occasion to 
establish any personal acquaintance with me. Up- 
on this explanation, and the evidence of his having 
inherited no atom of his fortune from his paternal 
line, I accepted his bounty so far as to appoint the 
next morning for calling on Mr. Heron, who then 
had chambers in Grav's Inn, when I would state 
the case to him, and refer myself to his judgment 
and good counsel. The result of my conference 
with the lately deceased Sir Richard Heron, was 
the insertion of a clause of resumption, empower- 
ing the donor to revoke his deed at any future 
time, when he should see fit, and this clause I par- 
ticularly pointed out to my benefactor, when he 
signed the deed. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 227 

" It was with difficulty I prevailed upon him to 
admit it, and can witness to the uneasiness it gave 
him, whilst he prophetically said I had left him 
exposed to the solicitations and remonstrances of 
his nephews, and that the time might come, when 
in the debility of age and irresolution of mind, he 
might be pressed into a revocation of what he had 
decided upon as the most deliberate act of his 
life. 

" My kind old friend stood a long siege before 
he suffered his prediction to take place ; for it was 
not till after nearly ten years of uninterrupted cor- 
diality, that, weak and wearied out by importunity, 
he capitulated with his besiegers, and sending his 
nephew into my house in Queen-Ann-street, un- 
expectedly one morning, surprised me with a de- 
mand, that I would render back the whole of his 
title deeds : I delivered them up exactly as 1 had 
received them ; his messenger put them into his 
hackney-coach, and departed. 

" In consequence of this proceeding I addressed 
the following letter to the Rev. Mr. Decimus Rey- 
nolds, at Clophill, in Bedfordshire : 

s Queen-iVnn-Street, 
8 Dear Sir, ' Monday, 13th Jan. 1779. 

c I received your letter by the conveyance 
c of Major George Reynolds, and in obedience to 
* your commands have resigned into his hands all 
' your title deeds, entrusted to my custody. I 

Q2 



£28 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

4 would liaVe -'had a schedule taken of them by 
4 Mr. Kipling, for your better satisfaction and 
4 security, but as your directions were peremptory, 
4 and Major Reynolds, who was ill, might have 
4 been prejudiced by any delay* I thought it best 
c to put them into his hands without further form, 
4 which, be assured, I have done, without the 
4 omission of one, for they have lain under seal at 
4 my banker's ever since they have been com- 
6 mitted to my care. 

4 Whatever motives may govern you, dear Sir, 
4 for recalling either your confidence, or your 
' 4 bounty, from me and my family, be assured you 
4 will still possess and retain my gratitude and 
6 esteem. I have only a second time lost a father, 
' and I am now too much in the habit of disap- 
c pointment and misfortune, not to acquiesce with 
' patience under the dispensation. 

4 You well can recollect, that your first bounty 
4 was unexpected and unsolicited ; it would have 
'been absolute, if I had not thought it for mv re- 
4 putation to make it conditional, and subject to 
4 your revocation : perhaps I did not believe you 
4 would revoke it, but since you have been in- 
4 diicecl to wish it, believe me, I rejoice in the re- 
4 flection, that every thing has been clone by me 
\ for your accommodation, and I had rather my 
4 children should inherit an honourable poverty 
4 than an ample patrimony, which caused the 
4 giver of it one moment of regret. " 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. %g§ 

' I believe I have some few papers still at Tet- 
' worth, which I received from you in the coun- 
c try. I shall shortly go down thither, and will 
c wait upon you with them. At the same time, if 
I you wish to have the original conveyance of your 
' lands, as drawn up by Sir Richard Heron, I shall 
c obey you by returning it; the uses being cancelled 
' the form can be of little value, and I can bear in 
' memory your former goodness without such a 
c remembrancer. 

' Mrs. Cumberland and my daughters join me 
c in love and respects to you and Mrs. Reynolds, 
6 whom by this occasion I beg to thank for all her 
1 kindness to me and mine. I spoke yesterday to 
' Sir Richard Heron,' [Sir Richard Heron was 
Chief Secretary in Ireland] c and pressed with more 
'" than common earnestness upon him, to fulfil your 
' wishes, in favour of Mr. Decimus Reynolds, in 
c Ireland. It would be much satisfaction to me to 
' hear the deeds came safe to hand, and I hope you 
4 will favour me with a line to say so. 

c I am, &c. &c. 

■ r. c: 

" I have been the more particular in the detail 
of this transaction, because I had been unfairly re- 
presented by a relation, whom, in the former part 
of these memoirs, I have recorded as the friend of 
my youth ; a man, whom I dearly loved, and to- 



230 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

wards whom I had conducted myself through the 
whole progress of this affair with the strictest 
honour and good faith, voluntarily subjecting my- 
self, the father of six children, to be deprived of 
a valuable gift, which the bestower of it wished to 
have been absolute and irrevocable/ 1 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 231 



CHAP. XI. 

The 'popularity which attended a successful drama- 
tic author in preceding times.- — Causes of this, 
and of the decay of that popularity. — The cele- 
brity of Cumberland from the performance of 
the West Indian. — Obtains him the society of 
Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Reynolds, 
Sfc. — His character of Johnson. — An adum- 
bration of him in the Observer. — Comparison 
between him and Burke in the poem of Retro- 
spection. — Johnson a better Greek Scholar 
than is insinuated by Cumberland. — Observa- 
tions upon simplicity of style. 

The production of a successful play, fifty years 
ago, was an event not commonly beheld, and its 
value was not cheapened in the eyes of men by 
its frequency. A dramatic writer came forth, 
with all the attractions which novelty and merit 
could give him ; and if he succeeded, he succeeded 
with a degree of popularity which is now denied 
to all literary enterprise, for in no department 
can a candidate exert himself in which competi- 
tors are not hourly contending with him for supre- 
macy. A play-writer is now the most familiar of 
human objects ; he that can produce nothing else, 
can produce a something which, by the help of 



23% LIFE OF CUMBERLAND.-' 

scenery, grimace, and a cant phrase or two, shall 
run nine nights, then to recede from public notice, 
to make way for some other thing just as excellent 
and just as brief in its existence. The demand for 
novelty is incessant, and incessantly is it supplied; 
but, as voracious eaters are commonly observed to 
be not very nice or fastidious in their food, so those 
whose appetites for what is new are stronger than 
their relish of what is good, and it naturally results 
that their providers will furnish them with the 
cheapest commodities. The frequency of modern 
dramas, indeed, produces an effect something like 
the familiar exhibitions of the person of Hal, and 
the profound observations of life that are contained 
ill the reproof which Shakspeare has put into his 
father's mouth, will aptly apply to the surfeited 
and over-gorged stage of the present day : — 

(t They began 
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little 
More than a little is by mnch too much. 
So when we had occasion to be seen, 
He was but as the cuckoo is in June, 
Heard, not regarded ; seen, but with such eyes, 
As, sick and blunted with community 
Afford no extraordinary gaze, 
Such as is bent on sun-like majesty 
When it shines seldom in admiring eyes." 

If the difficulty of success, however, was in- 
creased to the dramatic writers of former times, 
their renown, when successful, was in proportion 
to the obstructions by which its acquisition was 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 233*" 

intercepted. No mode of literary labour was so 
certainly calculated to secure that idol, popularity, 
to which all men sacrifice who have any anxiety 
for the " last infirmity of noble minds/' or who 
wish to secure power by the appearance of possess- 
ing it already. The conceptions of the author 
were aided by those of the actor ; his wit and hu- 
mour acquired fresh lustre and fresh powers of 
exciting mirth, by the assistance of gesture, look, 
and voice ; scenic splendour concurred to increase 
the general delusion, and that which in the closet 
was found to have but little dominion over the 
gay or serious feelings of the reader, made him 
smile or weep without resistance, when he sat in 
the theatre as a spectator. 

This command over the passions, in which some- 
times more belonged to the actor than to the author, 
was ascribed chiefly to the genius of the latter, and 
every man was eager to behold, to court, and to cele- 
brate him whose pen had produced such extraordi- 
nary effects. His happiest passages were repeated 
from mouth to mouth ; his flashes of wit were told 
at every table ; his felicity of execution was related 
with applause ; and hardly any company could 
assemble where some rumours of his glory and 
success would not be heard. His name resounded 
in every house ; and he could scarcely appear 
abroad without hearing something that reminded 
him of his dramatic celebrity. 

These were the rewards of those who, in former 



l 234t LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

times, trod in the steps of Shakspeare, Ford, 
Massinger, Shirley, Beaumont and Fletcher, and 
Jonson. They were a race of men not common 
enough to be despised. They wrote with leisure, 
for one good play w r as held to be sufficient for one 
season ; they had few competitors, for there was 
no demand for novelties beyond what a few able 
writers could supply ; and every man who could 
connect together some twenty scenes of conversa- 
tion, divided afterwards into five acts, and call the 
speakers, characters, was not then a dramatic 
writer, nor was there any easy avenue to a public 
trial of his skill. 

As, therefore, the field of exertion was reserved 
for a few candidates, and as those few but seldom 
exacted the applauses of their judges, their appear- 
ance came to be a rarity, and their success a thing 
to be talked of. Dryden, indeed, in the period to 
which I allude, was an exception to this absti- 
nence; but the list of dramas produced by Con- 
greve, Otvvay,Rowe, Southerne, Steele, and others, 
sufficiently testifies the truth of my assertions, 
and sufficiently accounts for that sort of popularity 
which once belonged to a successful dramatist. 

I k.iow, indeed, but of one path, in modern 
times, that will certainly lead either to equal re- 
nown or to equal reward : and that is the path of 
calumny. A convicted libeller, (especially a poli- 
tical one) is sure to make his fortune, and to raise 
his name ; for while he triumphantly enters the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 23o 

prison, which is the legal reward of his actions, 
some knave or fool proposes a subscription to re- 
lieve his sufferings, and that is his political reward. 
His name is, for a time, in the mouths of the vul- 
gar, and his pockets are filled by the donations of 
the crafty, the weak, and the credulous. The 
time of his liberation arrives ; he walks forth from 
his dungeon a stranger to the face of day; infests 
society for awhile with repetitions of his calum- 
nies and abuse, till insulted law again consigns 
him to his cell, and another subscription buys him 
again his " dirty and dependent bread." 

Crimine ah uno disce omnes 

Though the infrequency of dramatic productions 
was something less in Cumberland's time than in 
that which preceded it, there was still, however, 
enough of novelty in the event to excite much 
public attention, and to procure much popularity 
for the successful writer; and Cumberland himself 
says, that after the acting of the West Indian, he 
was the Master Betty of his day, a mode of com- 
parison for which he was indebted to a public 
fatuity as extraordinary as ever disgraced the taste 
of any nation. 

One consequence of this popularity was, that 
he was admitted to the society of men of eminence 
for rank and talent, and among his associates we 
find the names of Burke, Reynolds, Johnson, Gar- 
rick, Goldsmith, Foote, and Jenyns. With these 



236 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

illustrious characters he lived in familiar society, 
and he has transmitted to posterity, both in his 
Memoirs, and in his poem of Retrospection, some 
highly finished sketches of their peculiar qualities 
and excellencies. These are, perhaps, the best 
things he ever wrote, whether in prose or poetry ; 
they are distinguished by a felicity of expression, 
and vividness of colouring, which affect the mind 
with the same impressions of real and visible 
existence, as a fine painting does the physical or- 
gan of sight. As they relate, also, to persons of 
whom too much cannot be known, they are always 
read with that interest which attaches to every 
thing connected with the illustrious dead ; and 
being the testimony of one who knew them well, 
they come before the reader with an authority and 
recommendation which all transmitted testimonies 
must always want. 

Of Johnson it may be thought that nothing has 
been untold which kindness or enmity could re- 
late; yet, as every man views an object wjth feel- 
ings which are peculiarly his own, and wrjich dis- 
tinguish his representation from every other, the fol- 
lowing portrait of that extraordinary character still 
pleases, because it contains some finer strokes 
not familiar to us, though all the bolder outlines 
are. 

" Who will, say," he asks, " that Johnson 
would have been such a champion in literature, 
such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 237 

had not been pressed into the service, and driven 
on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity 
pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him 
into a field of clover, he would have laid down 
and rolled in it. The mere manual labour of writ- 
ing would not have allowed his lassitude and love 
of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn* 
unless the cravings of hunger had reminded him 
that he must fill the sheet before he saw the table 
cloth. He might indeed have knocked down Os- 
bourne for a blockhead, but he would not have 
knocked him down with a folio of his own writing. 
He would perhaps have been the dictator of a 
club, and wherever he sate down to conversation, 
there must have been that splash of strong bold 
thought about him, that we might still have had a 
collectanea after his death ; but of prose I guess 
not much, of works of labour none, of fancy per- 
haps something more, especially of poetry, which 
under favour I conceive was not his tower of 
/ strength. I think we should have had his Rasse- 
las at all events, for he was likely enough to have 
written at Voltaire, and brought the question to 
the test, if infidelity is any aid to wit. An ora- 
tor he must have been ; not improbably a parlia- 
mentarian, and, if such, certainly an oppositionist, 
for he preferred to talk against the tide. He 
would indubitably have been no member of the 
Whig Club, no partisan of AYilkes, no friend of 
Hume, no believer in Macpherson ; he would have 



23S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

put up prayers for early rising, and laid in bed all 
day, and with the most active resolutions possible 
been the most indolent mortal living. He was a 
good man by nature, a great man by genius, we 
are now to enquire what he was by compulsion. 

" Johnson's first style was naturally energetic, 
his middle style was turgid to a fault, his latter 
style was softened down and harmonised into pe- 
riods, more tuneful and more intelligible. His 
execution was rapid, yet his mind was not easily 
provoked into exertion ; the variety we find in his 
writings was not the variety of choice arising from 
the impulse of his proper genius, but tasks im- 
posed upon him by the dealers in ink, and con- 
tracts on his part submitted to in satisfaction of the 
pressing calls of hungry want ; for, painful as it is 
to relate, I have heard that illustrious scholar as- 
sert (and he never varied from the truth of fact) 
that he subsisted himself for a considerable space 
of time upon the scanty pittance of fourpence half- 
penny per day. How melancholy to reflect that 
his vast trunk and stimulating appetite were to be 
supported by what will barely feed the weaned in- 
fant ! Less, much less, than Master Betty has 
earned in one night, would have cheered the 
mighty mind, and maintained the athletic body of 
Samuel Johnson in comfort and abundance for a 
twelvemonth. Alas! I am not fit to paint his 
character : nor k there need of it ; Etiam mortuus 
loquitur; every man, who can buy a book, has 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. VW 

bought a Boswell ; Johnson is known to all the 
reading world. I also knew him well, respected him 
highly, loved him sincerely ; it was never my chance 
to see him in those moments of moroseness and ill 
humour, which are imputed to him, perhaps with 
truth, for who would slander him] But I am not 
warranted by any experience of those humours to 
speak of him otherwise than of a friend, who 
always met me with kindness, and from whom I 
never separated without regret. — When I sought 
his company he had no capricious excuses for 
withholding it, but lent himself to every invitation 
with cordiality, and brought good humour with 
him, that gave life to the circle he was in. He 
presented himself always in his fashion of apparel; 
a brown coat with metal buttons, black waistcoat 
and worsted stockings, with a flowing bob wig, 
was the style of his wardrobe, but they were in 
perfectly good trim, and with the ladies, which he 
generally met, he had nothing of the slovenly phi- 
losopher about him ; he fed heartily, but not vora- 
ciously, and was extremely courteous in his com- 
mendations of any dish, that pleased his palate ; he 
suffered his next neighbour to squeeze the China 
oranges into his wine glass after dinner, which 
else perchance had gone aside, and trickled into 
his shoes, for the good man had neither straight 
sight nor steady nerves. 

" At the tea table he had considerable demands 
upon his favourite beverage, and I remember when 



240 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 

Sir Joshua Reynolds, at my house, reminded him 
that he had drank eleven cups, he replied — c Sir, I 
did not count your glasses of wine, why should 
you number up my cups of tea ?' And then laugh- 
ing in perfect good humour, he added — ' Sir, I 
should have released the lady from any further 
trouble, if it had not been for your remark ; but 
you have reminded me that I want one of the 
dozen, and I must request Mrs. Cumberland to 
round up my number — ' When he saw the readi- 
ness and complacency with which my wife obeyed 
his call, he turned a kind and cheerful look upon 
her, and said- — c Madam, I must tell you for your 
comfort, you have escaped much better than a cer- 
tain lady did awhile ago, upon whose patience I 
intruded greatly more than I have done on yours ; 
but the lady asked me for no other purpose but to 
make a Zany of me, and set me gabbling to a par- 
cel of people I knew nothing of: so, madam, I had 
my revenge of her: for I swallowed five and twenty 
cups of her tea, and did not treat her with as 
many words — ' I can only say my wife would 
have made tea for him as long as the New River 
could have supplied her with water. 

" It was on such occasions he was to be seen in 
his happiest moments, w T hen, animated by the 
cheering attention of friends, whom he liked, he 
would give full scope to those talents for narration, 
in which, I verily think, he was unrivalled, both 
in the brilliancy of his wit, the flow of his humour. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 241 

and the energy of his language. Anecdotes of 
times past, scenes of his own life, and characters 
of humourists, enthusiasts, crack-brained projec- 
tors, and a variety of strange beings, that he 
had chanced upon, when detailed by him at 
length, and garnished with those episodical re- 
marks, sometimes comic, sometimes grave, which 
he would throw in with infinite fertility of fancy, 
were a treat, which though not always to be pur- 
chased by five and twenty cups of tea, I have 
often had the happiness to enjoy for less than half 
the number. He was easily led into topics ; it 
was not easy to turn him from them : but who 
would wish it? If a man wanted to shew himself 
off, by getting up and riding upon him, he was 
sure to run restive and kick him off; you might as 
safely have backed Bucephalus, before Alexander 
had lunged him. Neither did he always like to be 
overfondled ; when a certain gentleman out-acted 
his part in this way, he is said to have demanded of 
him — c What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have 
I said any thing that you understand ?— Then I 
ask pardon of the rest of the company — ' But this 
is Henderson's anecdote of him, and I won't 
swear he did not make it himself. The following 
apology, however, I myself drew from him, when 
speaking of his tour, I observed to him, upon 
some passages, as rather too sharp upon a country 
and people, who had entertained him so hand- 
somely — ' Do you think so, Cumbey?' he re- 

R 



242 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

plied. — ' Then I give you leave to say, and you 
may quote me for it, that there are more gentlemen 
in Scotland than there are shoes. — ' 

" The expanse of matter, which Johnson had 
found room for in his intellectual storehouse, the 
correctness with which he had assorted it, and the 
readiness with which he could turn to any article 
that he wanted to make present use of, were the 
properties in him, which I contemplated with the 
most admiration. Some have called him a savage ; 
they were only so far right in the resemblance, as 
that, like the savage, he never came into suspici- 
ous company without his spear in his hand, and 
his bow and quiver at his back. In quickness of 
intellect few ever equalled him, in profundity of 
erudition many have surpassed him. I do not 
think he had a pure and classical taste, nor was 
apt to be best pleased with the best authors, but 
as a general scholar he ranks very high. When I 
would have consulted him upon certain points of 
literature, whilst I was making my collections 
from the Greek dramatists for my essays in the 
Observer, he candidly acknowledged, that his stu- 
dies had not lain amongst them, and certain it is 
there is very little shew of literature in his Ram- 
blers, and in the passage, where he quotes Aris-' 
totle, he has not correctly given the meaning of the 
original. But this was merely the result of haste 
and inattention, neither is he so to be measured, 
for he had so many parts and properties of scholar- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 243 

ship about him, that you can only fairly review 
him as a man of general knowledge. As a poet 
his translations of Juvenal gave him a name in the 
world, and gained him the applause of Pope* He 
was a writer of tragedy, but his Irene gives him 
no conspicuous rank in that department. As an 
essayist he merits more consideration; his Ram- 
blers are in every body's hands ; about them opi- 
nions vary, and I rather believe the style of these 
essays is not now considered as a good model ; this 
he corrected in his more advanced age, as may be 
seen in his Lives of the Poets, where his diction, 
though occasionally elaborate and highly metapho- 
rical, is not nearly so inflated and ponderous, as in 
the Ramblers. He was an acute and able critic ; 
the enthusiastic admirers of Milton, and the friends 
of Gray, will have something to complain of, but 
criticism is a task, which no man executes to all 
men's satisfaction. His selection of a certain pas- 
sage in the Mourning Bride of Congreve, which he 
extols so rapturously, is certainly a most unfortu- 
nate sample; but unless the oversights of a cri- 
tic are less pardonable than those of other men, we 
may pass this over in a work of merit, which 
abounds in beauties far more prominent than its 
defects, and much more pleasing to contemplate. 
In works professedly of fancy he is not very copi- 
ous; yet, in his Rasselas we have much to admire, 
and enough to make us wish for more. It is the 
work of an illuminated mind, and offers many wise 

R2 



244 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and deep reflections, clothed in beautiful and har- 
monious diction. We are not indeed familiar with 
such personages as Johnson has imagined for the 
characters of his fable, but if we are not exceed- 
ingly interested in their story, we are infinitely 
gratified with their conversation and remarks. In 
conclusion, Johnson's era was not wanting in men 
to be distinguished for their talents, yet, if one 
was to be selected out as the first great literary 
character of the time, I believe all voices would 
concur in naming him." 

There is nothing in this character which is not 
warranted by all that we know of the man, except 
that anecdote which Cumberland hesitatingly de- 
livers upon the authority of Henderson. Of this 
I doubt the truth. It has not Johnson's usual man- 
ner of retort; it has neither cool, sarcastic irony, 
nor overbearing vehemence of contradiction or 
attack ; it has more of feeble insolence in it than 
either of these ; but when Johnson meant to sub- 
due by severity, his onset was vigorous and deci- 
sive ; he overcame by irresistible force. 

Non telum imbelle sine ictu conjecit. 

There is, however, a paper in the Observer, which 
seems to oppose Cumberland's having doubted the 
authenticity of this anecdote, or at least it involves 
him in the absurdity of telling twice what he hardly 
believed at all. In No. XVII. of that paper, he 
describes his visit to Vanessa (probably Mrs. Men- 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 245 

tagu), who had invited him to a feast of reason. 
Here, among the company who are present, is one 
evidently intended for Johnson. " He spoke," 
says Cumberland, " with great energy, and in the 
most chosen language ; nobody yet attempted to 
interrupt him, and his words rolled not with the 
shallow impetuosity of a torrent, but deeply and 
fluently like the copious current of the Nile. He 
took up the topic of religion in his course, and, 
though palsy shook his head, he looked so terri- 
ble in Christian armour, and dealt his stroke with 
so much force and judgment, that infidelity, in the 
persons of several petty skirmishers, sneaked away 
from before him." 

This grave personage is pestered with the vapid 
applauses of a pert listener, of whom the sage is at 
last provoked to ask, " Have I said any thing, 
good Sir, that you do not comprehend?" — " No, 
no ;" replied the teasing animal, U I perfectly well 
comprehend every word you have been saying ;" — 
" Do you, Sir," said the philosopher, " then I 
heartily ask pardon of the company for misemploy- 
ing their time so egregiously," — and stalked away 
without waiting for an answer. 

This is a reply exactly similar in its import, to 
that which is ascribed to Johnson in the Memoirs; 
there are some verbal differences in it, but they do 
not destroy the obvious conclusion that the same 
speaker is intended in both. 

Johnson had some regard for Cumberland, 



$46 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and thought highly of his intellectual powers. 
In Mrs. Piozzi's collection of his letters, there is 
one, (Letter CCXV.) in which he says, " the 
want of company is an inconvenience, but Mr. 
Cumberland is a million." This was a brief but 
emphatic commendation ; and is entitled to much 
consideration, when we consider that Johnson 
seldom praised those whom he had not found de- 
serving of praise upon the closest inspection. 

I should suspect, however, that the intercourse 
between them was not very habitual, for Cumber- 
land's name does not once appear as an interlocutor 
in that most accurate digest of Johnson's conversa- 
tion and visits, Boswell's Life of him, Had he 
been a frequent or customary member of those so- 
cieties in which Johnson moved, he would some- 
times have found a place in those volumes. But 
he knew him enough to admire his talents, to re- 
verence his virtues, and to love his memory. Be- 
sides the sketch of his character already quoted, he 
wrote the following lines more concisely descrip- 
tive of him :— 

" Herculean strength, and a Stentorian voice, 

Of wit a fund, of words a countless choice ; 

In learning rather various than profound, 

In truth intrepid, in religion sound ; 

A trembling form, and a distorted sight, 

But firm in judgment, and in genius bright ; 

In controversy seldom known to spare, 

But humble as the publican in prayer ; 

To more, than merited his kindness, kind, 

And though in manners harsh, of friendly mind ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 247 

Deep ting'd with melancholy's blackest shade,. 
And though prepar'd to die, of death afraid, — 
Such Johnson was, of him with justice vain 
When will this nation see his like again V* 



I will not praise the execution of this passage ; 
nor can I apply to it the trite phrase, materiam 
superabat opus. It were impossible, indeed, 
to do this, had a Milton sat down to the task, or a 
Pope, in the happiest mood of poetical inspiration, 
drawn the character of such a man, with a felicity of 
performance rivalling the matchless delineations of 
Wharton and Atticus. I will however produce, from 
the same pen, a poetical picture as far surpassing 
this as theirs would have surpassed either. I can- 
not think it necessary to make any courteous 
apologies to the reader for these extracts ; the end 
of all writing is to please, and he will most likely 
produce pleasure who produces the greatest variety 
and the greatest excellence. 

The quotation which follows, is from his poem 
of u Retrospection/' where he discusses, with a 
pleasing familiarity of style, the respective merits 
of Burke and Johnson, two names not to be paral- 
leled in the records of modern literature : 



" Nature gave to each 
Pow'rs, that in some respects may be compar'd, 
For both were orators— -and could we now 
Canvass the social circles where they mix'd, 
The palm for eloquence, by general vote, 
Would rest with him whose thunder never shook 
The senate or the bar. When Burke harangu'd 



248 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

The nation's representatives, methought 
The fine machinery that his fancy wrought,* 
Rich but fantastic, sometimes would obscure 
That symmetry which ever should uphold 
The dignity and order of debate : 
'Gainst orator like this, had Johnson rose, 
So clear was his perception of the truth, 
So grave his judgment, and so high the swell 
Of his full period, I must think his speech 
Had charm'd as many, and enlightened more. 

Yet, that the sword of Burke could be as sharp 
As it was shining, Hastings can attest 
Who, through a siege of ten long years, withstood 
* Its huge, two-handed sway,' that stript him bare 
Of fortune, and had cut him deeper still 
Had innocence not arm'd him with that shield 
Which turn'd tfye stroke aside, and sent him home 
To seek repose in his paternal farm. 

Johnson, if right I judge, in classic lore, 
Was more diffuse than deep, he did not dig 
So many fathoms down as Bentley dug 
In Grecian soil, but far enough to find 
Truth ever at the bottom of his shaft ; 
Burke, borne by genius on a lighter wing, v 
Skimm'd o'er the fiow'ry plains of Greece and Rome, 
And, like the bee, returning to its hive, 
Brought nothing home but sweets ; Johnson would dash 
Thro' sophists or grammarians, ankle deep, 
And rummage in their mud to trace a date, 
Or hunt a dogma down that gave offence 
To his philosophy. 

Both had a taste 
For contradiction, but in mode unlike ; 
Johnson at once would doggedly pronounce 
Opinions false, and after prove them such : 
Burke, not less critical, but more polite 
With ceaseless volubility of tongue, 
Play'd round and round his subject, till at length, 

* These two lines form, accidentally, a couplet. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 249 

Content to find you willing to admire, 
He ceas'd to urge or win you to assent. 

Burke of a rival's eminence would speak 
With candour always, often with applause ; 
Johnson, tho' prone to pity, rarely prais'd. 

The pun which Burke encourag'd, Johnson spurn'd ; 
Yet none with louder glee would cheer the laugh 
That well-tim'd wit, or cleanly humour rais'd ; 
And when no cloud obscur'd his mental sphere, 
And all was sunshine in his friendly breast, 
He would hold up a mirror to our eyes, 
In which the human follies might be seen 
In characters so comic, yet so true, 
Description from his lips was like a cbarm 
That fix'd the hearers motionless and mute. 
Burke, by his senatorial pow'rs obtain'd, 
Ten times as much as Johnson by his pen ; 

But ' thanks to Thurlow,' I rejoice to own, 

That learning and morality at last 

Could earn a pittance, humble as it was. 
Splendor of style, fertility of thought, 

And the bold use of metaphor in both, 

Strike us with rival beauty ; Burke display' d 

A copious period, that with curious skill 

And ornamental epithet drawn out, 

Was, like the singer's cadence, sometimes apt, 

Although melodious, to fatigue the ear ; 

Johnson, with terms unnaturalis'd and rude, 

And Latinisms fore'd into his line 

Like raw undrill'd recruits would load his text, 

High sounding and uncouth : yet if you cull 

His happier pages you will find a style 

Quinctilian might have prais'd ; still I perceive 

Nearer approach to purity in Burke, 

Though not the full accession to that grace, 

That chaste simplicity, which is the last 

And best attainment an author can possess." 

Of these characters, thus pleasingly given, very 
little can be said in diminution of their accuracy. 
I observe, however, that Cumberland repeats his 



250 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

opinion of Johnson's inferiority as a Greek scholar, 
and he seems to repeat it with too little allowance 
for what he did possess in that language. It is 
true, he was not so profoundly versed in the Gre- 
cian authors as Bentley, for he had not made them 
his peculiar study ; perhaps he knew less of Greek 
writers than Cumberland himself; he acknow- 
ledged to him, indeed, that this was the case with 
respect to some parts of Greek literature; but we 
have the testimony of Dr. Burney (Qui mihi unus 
est instar omnium) " that he could give a Greek 
word for almost every English one ; and that, al- 
though not sufficiently conversant in the niceties 
of the language, he, upon some occasions, disco- 
vered, even in these, a considerable degree of cri- 
tical acumen." The late Mr. Dalzel, also, Greek 
Professor in the University of Edinburgh, had 
formed a very high notion of Johnson's acquire- 
ments in Greek from a conversation which he held 
with him on that language. 

Nor are these the only evidences that his gene- 
ral proficiency was greater than Cumberland 
apparently insinuates it, though it happened 
that he consulted him in vain upon some 
topics relative to the Greek fragments. We are 
told by Mrs. Piozzi, in her Anecdotes of Johnson, 
" that when the King of Denmark was in England, 
one of his noblemen was brought by Mr. Colman 
to see Dr. Johnson at her country house ; and 
having heard, he said, that he was not famous for 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 2ol 

Greek literature, attacked him on the weak side-, 
politely adding, that he chose that conversation on 
purpose to favour himself. The Doctor, however, 
displayed so copious, so compendious a knowledge 
of authors, books, and every branch of learning in 
that language, that the gentleman appeared asto- 
nished. When he was gone home, Johnson said, 
< Now for all this triumph, I may thank Thrale's 
Xenophon here, as, I think, excepting that one, 
I have not looked in a Greek book these ten years ; 
but see what haste my dear friends were all in 
(continued he) to tell this poor innocent foreigner 
that I knew nothing of Greek ! Oh no, he 
knows nothing of Greek !' with a loud burst of 
laughing.' ' 

From these testimonies it may surely be in- 
ferred, with little danger of error, that though 
Johnson could not rank with a Bentley, a Porson, 
a Burney, or a Parr, his general knowledge of Greek 
was such as would have conferred distinction upon 
any man less pre-eminently endowed than he was 
with other qualities of excellence : and thai Cum- 
berland, while he insinuated what he did not 
possess, hardly allowed, with sufficient candor, 
that which he confessedly did possess. 

In the preference which Cumberland seems to 
give to Burke's style, he speaks of its superior 
simplicity compared to that of Johnson. But in 
this judgement I do not think him correct. The 
language of Burke is diffuse, copious, and sonorous: 



2,59 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

richly ornamented with metaphor, allusion, and 
prosopopeia ; declamatory and vehement, and suited 
rather to the orator than the writer. It rushes 
along, sometimes, with all the majestic rapidity 
of a deep and impetuous torrent, and at others 
flows with an ease and gentleness of course that 
resembles the passage of a limpid stream between 
the verdant banks of a champaign country. In 
the selection of his words he does not so often 
employ pure Latinismsas Johnson, and he is com- 
monly very felicitous in the use of terms that 
express a complex association of ideas. 

Burke, indeed, has never been reckoned, as far as 
I know, to possess simplicity of style ; but, on the 
I contrary, it was usually urged against him, both in 
his speeches and in his writings, that he employed 
a language more artificial, florid, and rhetorical, 
than was supposed to be consistent with the ge- 
nius of the English tongue. When he imitated 
Bolingbroke he wrote perhaps with more sim- 
plicity than on any other occasion. Warburton in- 
deed said that his Vindication of Natural Society 
was superior in composition to any work which he 
afterwards produced : and a modern writer,* whose 
opinion is entitled to great respect, concurs with 
him in this notion. But he is not disposed to 
allow that Burke's style had any simplicity in it. 

" Its defect," he observes, " lay in his taste, 
which, when left to itself without the guidance of 

* Dugald Stewart : see his Philosophical Essays : 1810. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. §53 

an acknowledged standard of excellence, appears 
not only to have been warped by some peculiar 
notions concerning the art of writing: but to have 
been too wavering and versatile, to keep his ima- 
gination and his fancy (stimulated as they were by 
an ostentation of his intellectual riches, and by an 
ambition of Asiatic ornament), under due control. 
With the composition of Bolingbroke, present 
to his thoughts, he has shewn with what ease he 
could equal its most finished beauties ; while, on 
more than one occasion, a consciousness of his 
own strength has led him to display his superiority, 
by brandishing, in his sport, still heavier weapons 
than his master was able to wield/' 

Simplicity is a quality in writing, which, when 
skilfully employed always pleases. But it is a 
dangerous pursuit: for, where one succeeds in his 
endeavours to attain it, hundreds fail. Cumberland 
himself failed, as I shall endeavour to prove here- 
after. The admirers of simplicity are too apt to 
confound with it, meanness and vulgarity ; and, 
by studiously receding from all that is ornamental 
in composition, degenerate into feebleness and 
inelegance. Compared to such writing, however, 
the worst errors of a turgid and bombastic 
phraseology are preferable. A mean or trite 
idea pompously caparisoned, like an insignificant 
fellow richly dressed, captivates our senses, if it 
do not add to our knowledge: but a mean idea, 
meanly expressed, is as sorry a spectacle as a 



95^ LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

scoundrel in rags, having neither real nor apparent 
worth in it. 

The perfection of writing consists, however, not 
in uniformity but variety ; in a style so flexible 
that it adapts itself to the subject discussed, and 
rises or falls as the ideas are elevated or familiar. 
Always to fly, or always to walk, is the character 
of a bad writer : he who has genius to conceive 
lofty thoughts, will have power to construct his 
language suitably to them ; and when he descends, 
his diction will assume a corresponding depression. 
In this conformity consists the art of good writing : 
and we may judge of its difficulty from its rarity. 
We more commonly find a manner in distinguished 
authors, which results from a specific structure of 
their sentences, and the frequent employment of 
peculiar modes of expression. It would be easy 
to exemplify this by select passages from Johnson, 
Gibbon, Robertson, Swift, and Burke: but this is 
not the place: I pass to more legitimate topics. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. . 955 



CHAP. XII. 

Motives for the extracts from Cumberland. — His 
portrait of Go ldsmith . — A defence of Sir John 
Hill and of Goldsmith's Histories. — Also 
his Animated Nature. — Anecdotes of him. — 
Johnson s epitaph upon him, and encomiastic 
sentence in the Life of Pamell. — The poem of 
Retaliation. — His epitaph upon Cumberland 
contains more censure than praise. — Proof of 
this. — Cumberland } s sketch of him in his Retro- 
spection, more happily touched off than in his 
Memoirs. 

I reluctantly forego the pleasure of accom- 
panying Cumberland through the other portraits 
which he has given of Garrick, Foote, Burke, and 
Jenyns. They are distinguished by the same fe- 
licity of delineation, and give the same pleasure in 
perusal : but as they are of men, whose general 
qualities, both public and private, are already 
familiar to most readers, and as it maybe presumed 
that many who read this volume, will have read 
the book in which they are to be found, their 
omission here will be the more venial. Nor, in- 
deed, do I wish to encumber my pages with 
superfluous or excessive quotation, but simply to 
be guided by a consideration of what I consider 



%56 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

really interesting to the reader, consistently with 
my avowed purpose and desire to produce an ori- 
ginal work. I have occasionally relieved the nar- 
rative by the transcription of such passages as I 
thought would be deprived of much of their value 
if mutilated, or told in any language but Cumber- 
land's, and I have sometimes been influenced in 
my adoption of his words, from a desire to give 
authenticity to particular statements. 

Consistently with this motive, however, I could 
well have extended my quotations from that part 
of his Memoirs which contain the characters already 
mentioned, to a much greater degree, had not my 
inclination to do so, been subdued by considera- 
tions of another nature, co-operating powerfully 
with those already stated, and sufficiently obvious, 
perhaps, to render any further explanation of them 
unnecessary. 

One exception to my forbearance I must be 
allowed to claim in behalf of Goldsmith, a writer 
of whom so little is known, that every addition to 
that little becomes valuable. Cumberland knew 
him well, and has sketched his strangely incon- 
sistent character with fidelity. This, and the 
anecdotes relating to him, I will copy. 

" At this time," says Cumberland, " I did not 
know Oliver Goldsmith even by person ; I think 
our first meeting chanced to be at the British 
CofFee-House ; when we came together, we very 
speedily coalesced, and I believe he forgave me for 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 957 

all the little fame I had got by the success of my 
West Indian, which had put him to some trouble, 
for it was not his nature to be unkind, and I had 
soon an opportunity of convincing him how in- 
capable I was of harbouring resentment, and how 
zealously I took my share in what concerned his 
interest and reputation. That he was fantasti- 
cally and whimsically vain all the world knows, 
but there was no settled and inherent malice in his 
heart. He was tenacious to a ridiculous extreme 
of certain pretensions, that did not, and by nature 
could not, belong to him, and at the same time 
inexcusably careless of the fame, which he had 
powers to command. His table-talk was, as Gar- 
rick aptly compared it, like that of a parrot, whilst 
he wrote like Apollo ; he had gleams of eloquence, 
and at times a majesty of thought, but in general 
his tongue and his pen had two very different 
styles of talking. What foibles he had he took no 
pains to conceal, the good qualities of his heart 
were too frequently obscured by the carelessness 
of his conduct, and the frivolity of his manners. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds was very good to him, and 
would have drilled him into better trim and order 
for society, if he would have been amenable, for 
Reynolds was a perfect gentleman, had good sense, 
great propriety with all the social attributes, and 
all the graces of hospitality, equal to any man. He 
well knew how to appreciate men of talents, and 
how near a kin the Muse of poetry was to that 

S 



25S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

art, of which he was so eminent a master. From 
Goldsmith he caught the subject of his famous 
Ugolino: what aids he got from others, if he 
got any, were worthily bestowed and happily 
applied. 

" There is something in Goldsmith's prose, that 
to my ear is uncommonly sweet and harmonious ; 
it is clear, simple easy to be understood ; we never 
want to read his period twice over, except for the 
pleasure it bestows ; obscurity never calls us back 
to a repetition of it. That he was a poet there is 
no doubt, but the paucity of his verses does not 
allow us to rank him in that high station, where 
his genius might have carried him. There must 
be bulk, variety, and grandeur of design to con- 
stitute a first-rate poet. The Deserted Village, 
Traveller, and Hermit, are all specimens beautiful 
as such, but they are only birds eggs on a string, 
and eggs of small birds too. One great magnifi- 
cent whole must be accomplished before we can 
pronounce upon the maker to be the 6 Tco^mc, 
Pope himself never earned this title by a work 
of any magnitude but his Homer, and that being 
a translation only constitutes him an accomplished 
versifier. Distress drove Goldsmith upon under- 
taking's, neither congenial with his studies, nor 
worthy of his talents. I remember him, when in 
his chamber in the Temple, he shewed me the 
beginning of his Animated Nature; it was with a 
sigh, such as genius draws, when hard necessity 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. v 259 

diverts it from its bent to drudge for bread, and 
talk of birds and beasts and creeping things, which 
Pidcock's show-man would have done as well. 
Poor fellow, he hardly knew an ass from a mule, 
nor a turkey from a goose, but when he saw it on 
the table. But publishers hate poetry, and Pater- 
noster-Row is not Parnassus. Even the mighty 
Dr. Hill, who was not a very delicate feeder, could 
not make a dinner out of the press till by a happy 
transformation into Hannah Glasse he turned 
himself into a cook, and sold receipts for made 
dishes to all the savoury readers in the kingdom. 
Then, indeed, the press acknowledged him second 
in fame only to John Bunyan ; his feasts kept pace 
in sale with Nelson's fasts, and when his own name 
was fairly written out of credit, he wrote himself 
into immortality under an alias. Now, though 
necessity, or I should rather say, the desire of 
finding money for a masquerade, drove Oliver 
Goldsmith upon abridging histories, and turning 
BufTon into English ; yet I much doubt, if without 
that spur, he would ever have put his Pegasus into 
action; no, if he had been rich, the world would 
have been poorer than it is by the loss of all the 
treasures of his genius and the contributions of 
his pen/' 

There is, in this extract, too contemptuous a 
mention of Sir John Hill, a man who like Black- 
more, was so borne down by the ridicule of his 
contemporaries, that justice has not been done to 

S 2 



260 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the merits he really possessed. That he was an 
indefatigable, if not a very accurate, inquirer, must 
be allowed: and if he often failed in his schemes, 
it must also be allowed that he attempted more 
than most men. His misfortune was that he dis- 
sipated his strength upon many undertakings at 
once, and by doing many things ill, it was at last 
thought he could do nothing well. Yet he was a 
writer who, when livings commanded much atten- 
tion, and though some of his works may be suf- 
fered to remain in oblivion without any loss to 
mankind, there are others which deserve to be 
remembered. He was irritable, and rushed 
intemperately into controversies with men who 
were more powerful than himself, and who ge- 
nerally succeeded in repelling his attacks: but 
he sometimes vindicated himself with dignity and 
force, as in his altercation with Fielding, who had 
lampooned him in his Covent Garden Journal, and 
to whom he replied in such a manner as shewed 
he could resent an insult without scurrility or 
abuse. He was a voluminous writer, and pos- 
sessed great activity of mind : nor would his name 
now stand in the contempt it does had he produced 
less, and been more careful to conciliate contem- 
porary wits, whose jests and epigrams upon him are 
remembered and repeated, while those of his works 
are neglected which would rescue his memory 
from undeserved obscurity. 

I could wish also that Cumberland had ex- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 261 

pressed himself with less flippancy than he does 
when he mentions the histories of Goldsmith and 
his Animated Nature. It is true that he has not 
assumed the historic dignity of Hume, of Robert- 
son, or of Gibbon : he has disentangled no ob- 
scurities, searched into no records for facts that 
were before unknown, nor attempted to infer from 
those that were known consequences more in- 
genious perhaps than solid : these were things 
which, as he did not profess to do, he cannot be 
censured for omitting. But his object, such as it 
was, he completely attained. He produced a 
familiar and lucid arrangement of historical events, 
told them in elegant and harmonious language, 
with becoming brevity, and with the occasional 
expression of opinions favourable to liberty, morals, 
and religion. 

His History of England has long been considered 
as the most judicious and pleasing epitome that 
there is in the language: it is, with great propriety, 
introduced into all public schools ; and perhaps as 
much may be known from it, as can be known, 
with any advantage, from more voluminous his- 
torians, who are generally biassed towards some 
peculiar tenets, who tell all that will support those 
tenets, suppress what does not, invent what truth 
will not justify, then educe their own conclusions, 
and give the whole to the world as a record of 
facts. Every man who has deliberately considered 



269 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the subject, must allow, that much of history is 
nothing more than mere curious speculation, and 
that in reading it, the observance of Voltaire's 
maxim that incredulity is the source of wisdom, 
will be our best security for the acquisition of 
real knowledge. 

Nor does his History of Animated Nature de- 
serve to be so petulantly characterised as is done 
by Cumberland, when he denominates it " turning 
BufFon into English/' I doubt if he could have 
produced a work so pleasingly executed with the 
same materials, and without any aids from indi- 
vidual observation or scientific research. Naturalists 
indeed will not respect it as an authority in any 
disputed question: but they who read for plea- 
sure, and are content to be instructed without the 
labour of minute investigation, they who are satisfied 
with knowing the grand and permanent features of 
nature without inquiring into her hidden mysteries 
or contemplating her almost evanescent operations, 
will not willingly dismiss the volumes of Gold- 
smith from their shelves. Truth is dressed, by 
him, in her most enticing garb, while the errors 
that dwell upon his page are such as a man may 
receive without finding his utility or happiness 
impaired. 

These very productions, indeed, which Cum- 
berland dismisses with such contemptuous 
brevity, strongly illustrate and justify the eulo- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 265 

gium of his friend Johnson in his epitaph upon 
him, 

Qui nullum fere scribendi genus 

Non tetigit : 
Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit, 

and the introductory paragraph to the life of Par- 
nell, in which he pronounces him to be, " a man 
of such variety of powers, and such felicity of per- 
formance, that he always seemed to do best that 
which he was doing: a man who had the art of 
being minute without tediousness, and general 
without confusion : whose language was copious 
without exuberance, exact without constraint, and 
easy without weakness." 

This character, to be just, must embrace all his 
writings ; and that it is just, he who is best ac- 
quainted with his writings will be most ready to 
allow. The language of Cumberland, perhaps, 
expressed more than his meaning ; a thing not un- 
common in a man who writes with an ambition 
to be striking. 

I will now transcribe the conclusion of his 
anecdotes of him. 

" Oliver Goldsmith began at this time to write 
for the stage, and it is to be lamented that he did 
not begin at an earlier period of life to turn his 
genius to dramatic compositions, and much more 
to be lamented, that, after he had begun, the suc- 
ceeding period of his life was soon cut off. There 
is no doubt but his genius, when more familiarised 



264 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

to the business, would have inspired him to ac- 
complish great things. His first comedy of The 
Good-natured Man was read and applauded in its 
manuscript by Edmund Burke, and the circle, in 
which he then lived and moved ; under such pa- 
tronage it came with those testimonials to the 
director of Covent Garden theatre, as could not 
fail to open all the avenues to the stage, and be- 
speak all the favour and attention from the per- 
formers and the public, that the applauding voice 
of him, whose applause was fame itself, could 
give it. This comedy has enough to justify the good 
opinion of its literary patron, and secure its author 
against any loss of reputation, for it has the stamp 
of a man of talents upon it, though its popularity 
with the audience did not quite keep pace with 
the expectations, that were grounded on the fiat 
it had antecedently been honoured with. It was 
a first effort, however, and did not discourage its 
ingenious author from invoking his muse a second 
time. It was now, whilst his labours were in 
projection, that I first met him at the British 
Coffee-house, as 1 have already related somewhat 
out of place. He dined with us as a visitor, in- 
troduced as I think by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and 
we held a consultation upon the naming of his 
comedy, which some of the company had read, 
and which he detailed to the rest after his manner 
With a great deal of good humour. Somebody 
suggested — She Stoops to Conquer — and that title 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 265 

was agreed upon. When I perceived an embar- 
rassment in his manner towards me, which I could 
readily account for, I lost no time to put him at 
his ease, and I flatter myself I was successful. As 
my heart was ever warm towards my contempora- 
ries, I did not counterfeit, but really felt a cordial 
interest in his behalf, and I had soon the pleasure 
to perceive that he credited me for my sincerity — 
8 You and 1/ said he, ' have very different motives 
for resorting to the stage. I write for money, and 
care little about fame/ I was touched by this 
melancholy confession, and from that moment 
busied myself assiduously amongst all my con- 
nexions in his cause. The whole company 
pledged themselves to the support of the ingenuous 
poet, and faithfully kept their promise to him. In 
fact he needed all that could be done for him, as 
Mr. Colman, then manager of Covent-Garden 
theatre, protested against the comedy, when as 
yet he had not struck upon a name for it. John- 
son at length stood forth in all his terrors as 
champion for the piece, and backed by us his 
clients and retainers demanded a fair trial. Col- 
man again protested, but, with that salvo for his 
own reputation, liberally lent his stage to one of 
the most eccentric productions that ever found 
its way to it, and She Stoops to Conquer was put 
into rehearsal. ****** 
" As the life of poor Oliver Goldsmith was now 
fast approaching to its period, I conclude my 



$66 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

account of him with gratitude for the epitaph he 
bestowed on me in his poem called Retaliation. 
It was upon a proposal started by Edmund Burke, 
that a party of friends, who had dined together at 
Sir Joshua Reynolds' and my house, should meet 
at the St. James's Coffee-house, which accordingly 
took place, and was occasionally repeated with 
much festivity and good fellowship. Dr. Bernard, 
Dean of Deny, a very amiable and old friend of 
mine, Dr. Douglas, since Bishop of Salisbury, 
Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund and Richard Burke, 
Hickey, with two or three others constituted our 
party. At one of these meetings an idea was 
suggested of extemporary epitaphs upon the 
parties present ; pen and ink were called for, and 
Garrick off hand wrote an epitaph with a good 
deal of humour upon poor Goldsmith, who was 
the first in jest, as he proved to be in reality, that 
we committed to the grave. The dean also gave 
him an epitaph, and Sir Joshua illuminated the 
dean's verses with a sketch of his bust in pen and 
ink inimitably caricatured. Neither Johnson, nor 
Burke wrote any thing, and when I perceived 
Oliver was rather sore, and seemed to watch me 
with that kind of attention, which indicated his 
expectation of something in the same kind of 
burlesque with their's, I thought it time to press 
the joke no further, and wrote a few couplets at a 
side table, which when I had finished and was 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 26j 

called upon by the company to exhibit, Goldsmith 
with much agitation besought me to spare him, 
and I was about to tear them, when Johnson 
wrested them out of mv hand, and in a loud voice 
read them at the table. 1 have now lost all re- 
collection of them, and in fact they were little 
worth remembering, but as they were serious and 
complimentary, the effect they had upon Gold- 
smith was the more pleasing for being so entirely 
unexpected. The concluding line, which is the 
only one I can call to mind, was — 

" All mourn the poet, I lament the man." 

" This I recollect, because he repeated it several 
times, and seemed much gratified by it. At our 
next meeting he produced his epitaphs as they 
stand in the little posthumous poem above-men- 
tioned, and this was the last time he ever enjoyed 
the company of his friends. 

" As he had served up the company under the 
similitude of various sorts of meat, I had in the 
mean time figured them under that of liquors, 
which little poem I rather think was printed, but 
of this I am not sure. Goldsmith sickened and 
died, and we had one concluding meeting at my 
house, when it was decided to publish his Re- 
taliation, and Johnson at the same time undertook 
to write an epitaph for our lamented friend, to 
whom we proposed to erect a monument by sub- 
scription in Westminster-Abbey. This epitaph 



268 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Johnson executed : but in the criticism, that was 
attempted against it, and in the Round-Robin 
signed at Mr. Beauclerc's house I had no part. 
I had no acquaintance with that gentleman, and 
was never in his house in my life. 

" Thus died Oliver Goldsmith, in his chambers 
in the Temple, at a period of life, when his genius 
was yet in its vigour, and fortune seemed disposed 
to smile upon him. I have heard Dr. Johnson 
relate, with infinite humour, the circumstance of 
his rescuing him from a ridiculous dilemma by the 
purchase money of his Vicar of Wakefield, which 
he sold on his behalf to Dodsley, and, as I think, 
for the sum of ten pounds only. He had run up 
a debt with his landlady, for board and lodging, 
of some few pounds, and was at his wits-end how 
to wipe off the score and keep a roof over his head > 
except by closing with a very staggering proposal 
on her part, and taking his creditor to wife, whose 
charms were very far from alluring, whilst her de- 
mands were extremely urgent. In this crisis of his fate 
he was found by Johnson in the act of meditating on 
the melancholy alternative before him. He shewed 
Johnson his manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield, 
but seemed to be without any plan, or even hope, of 
raising money upon the disposal of it; when Johnson 
cast his eye upon it, he discovered something that 
gave him hope, and immediately took it to Dodsley, 
who paid down the price above-mentioned in 
ready money, and added an eventual condition 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. %69 

upon its future sale. Johnson described the pre- 
cautions he took in concealing the amount of the 
sum he had in hand, which he prudently admi- 
nistered to him by a guinea at a time. In the 
event he paid off the landlady's score, and re- 
deemed the person of his friend from her embraces. 
Goldsmith had the joy of finding his ingenious 
work succeed beyond his hopes, and from that 
time began to place a confidence in the resources of 
his talents, which thenceforward enabled him to 
keep his station in society, and cultivate the 
friendship of many eminent persons, who, whilst 
they smiled at his eccentricities, esteemed him 
for his genius and good qualities/' 

Cumberland affirms, in one part of his Memoirs, 
that he regularly read Boswell's Life of Johnson 
once a year. It may be wondered, therefore, that 
he should fall into so gross a mistake, as to 
state that Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was 
sold for ten pounds, when he might have learned, 
from two passages in that work, that Johnson dis- 
posed of it for sixty guineas. 

He repeats, also, the same account of Gold- 
smith's situation when he sent to Johnson and 
shewed him his last resource in his manuscript, 
as had been given by Mrs. Piozzi in her Anecdotes, 
and which Boswell pronounced to be false. The 
testimonies for the two relations seem to be nearlv 
equal. Mrs. Piozzi and Cumberland tell their* s 
from positive recollection : Boswell does the same, 



270 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and he produces one totally different. Where does 
the truth lie ? Johnson was a rigid observer of 
fidelity in all that he told; and as two wit- 
nesses are entitled to more credibility than one, 
where there is an equal respectability in all, we 
must suppose that the inaccuracy is in Boswell, 
and that the exact account is to be found in Cum- 
berland and Mrs. Piozzi. What increases the 
confusion is, that Sir John Hawkins, who also 
professes to tell what Johnson told, has given a 
narrative which differs from both. 

Who shall decide when doctors disagree ? 

It is to be regretted that Cumberland did not 
preserve his lines upon Goldsmith, produced on 
the occasion, as he has stated it. He thanks him, 
however, with gratitude for the epitaph which 
Goldsmith bestowed upon him in his posthumous 
poem of Retaliation, From this it may be con- 
jectured that he considered the lines as encomiastic: 
but though some of them certainly are, there are 
others which I think convey more censure than 
praise. Let the reader judge : 

Here Cumberland lies, having acted his parts, 

The. Terence of England, the mender of hearts ; 

A flattering painter, who made it his care 

To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are ; 

His gallants are all faultless, his women divine, 

And comedy wonders at being so fine : 

Like a tragedy queen he has dizen'd her out, 

Or rather like tragedy giving a rout. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 27* 

His fools have their follies so lost in a crowd 
Of virtues and feelings, that folly grows proud, 
And coxcombs alike in their failings alone, 
Adopting his portraits are pleas'd with their own ; 
Say, Avhere has our poet this malady caught ? 
Or, wherefore his characters thus without fault ? 
Say, was it that vainly directing his view 
To find out men's virtues, and finding them few, 
Cjuite sick of pursuing each troublesome elf, 
He grew lazy at last, and drew from himself? 

The first two lines of this epitaph are certainly 
encomiastic, and the last four are elegantly so. 
But surely it is no praise to a dramatic writer to be 
told that he has ec dizened comedy out like a tra- 
gedy queen/' or made her " like tragedy giving a 
rout." Nor is it very flattering to his skill in de- 
picting real life, that he " draws men as they 
ought to be, not as they are ;" these are such ex- 
cellencies as a comedian can well spare. It is the 
peculiar province of comedy to exhibit the man- 
ners and characters with fidelity; to make its per- 
sonages speak and act, as they are known to speak 
and act in the world, with only so much exaggera- 
tion as may serve to relieve the insipidity and lan- 
guor of domestic life. If it depart from this se- 
vere model, and encroach upon the confines of the 
tragic muse by pomp of diction, elevation of cha- 
racter, or dignity of incident, it ceases to be co- 
medy, without becoming its opposite, and pleases 
less than either. 

Some of these defects certainly belong to Cum- 



272 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

berland : and it was with a reference to them, 
which were conspicuously displayed in his early 
dramas, that Goldsmith probably wrote those se- 
vere lines which the object of them patiently con- 
ceived to be complimentary. 

It was well, however, he did think so ; or we 
should never, perhaps, have had that character, and 
those anecdotes of their author, which I have al- 
ready transcribed, or the following still more 
finished one : 

« There wants but Goldsmith now to make us full, 
And Garrick says he loiters by the way, 
Because forsooth some idle knave has said, 
That men of fashion should be always late, 
And by their want of manners shew their taste. 
Ah ! Oliver, your friend has found you out, 
For Johnson, with emphatic eyes, declares 
' David is right/ and that confirms the truth. 
But see, at length, th' eccentric being comes — 
Seasons and times to Goldsmith are unknown ; 
What he is not he would be, what he is 
He knows not, or forgets. Give him a pen, 
And clear as Helicon his period flows : 
Let him employ his tongue to speak his thoughts, 
It babbles idly, and betrays the trust. 
Yet this is he, whose prose I should not fear 
To match with Addison's, his verse with Pope's. 

' Heavens! is this he ?' a stranger might exclaim ; 
But though no stranger eye perchance could trace 
The secret mark, with which the muse had stamp'd 
His passport to the Heliconian fount, 
Yet Reynolds, by that sympathy of soul, 
Which Genius shares with Genius, saw the mark, 
And made his portrait witness to a mind, 
Which ill the original so few descried. 






LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 27$ 

But what avail'd it thee, neglected hard, 
How thy verse trickl'd, or thy period flow'd ? 
The loathsome vampire Poverty, through life, 
Insatiate, clung to thee, and suck'd thy blood 
To the last drop. By thy sick couch I stood, 
And saw death's hand was on thee ; shall I say 
That thou wert vain, and carelessly dispers'd 
The slender pittance that thy genius earn'd ? 
No, 'twere a cruel comment on thy life ; 
He who no harvest reaps can hoard no grain ; 
Had it not been that Johnson's generous zeal, 
For a few pounds, barter'd thy ' Vicar's Tale,' 
Penn'd in the veriest anguish of despair, 
The pavement, or the step to some proud door 
Had been thy stony pillow for the night." 

After this just eulogy of a man whose works 
will be forgotton only with the language in which 
they are written, follows a temperate but discrimi- 
nating censure of another poet (Mr. Walter Scott) 
to whose volumes I should be unwilling to promise 
an equal duration if I had any authority to lose 
as a prophet. His popularity is great, and no man 
acquires popularity without possessing something 
that deserves it; but popularity is a very equivocal 
test of merit. 

The history of modern literature is full of names 
that once stood upon as proud a height as this 
" proudest boast of the Caledonian muse" (to 
use the simple language of Miss Seward*), but 

* Did Miss Seward ever read Burns ? Had she no feeling of his poetry, 
justly so denominated ? I may be fastidious, perhaps, or utterly destitute 
of taste, but I would not rank with Burns' Tarn O'Skanter, his Vision, (par- 
ticularly the second DuanJ, his Twa Dogs, his Cotter's Saturday Nighty 
or his Jolly Begga/rs, any thing that ,Mr. Scott ever h»s written, or ever 
shall write. 



?74 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

which are now remembered neither with admira- 
tion nor delight. Posterity has not ratified the 
decree which contemporary applause too rashly 
littered. 

Mr. Scott has merit. No one will deny this who 
wishes to be believed. His descriptions, whether 
of visible nature, of feudal manners, or of the gor- 
geous scenes of chivalry, have a distinctness and 
appropriation in them as well as vigour, which 
rouse the imagination to a forcible conception of 
what he describes. But in that single excellence 
begins and ends his claim to eminence. The graces 
of composition he cannot display from the familiar 
structure of his verses, which, by recalling to the 
reader's mind the merry couplets of Butler and 
Swift, destroy those ideas of dignity, sublimity, 
and grandeur, which are associated with our no- 
tions of heroic poetry. 

If any one doubts the truth of this, let him try the 
happiest passages of Mr. Scott's poems with those 
of Milton or Dryden, Akenside or Pope, and mark 
how mean and insignificant the jingle of his eight- 
syllable lines will appear, compared to the lofty 
and sonorous march of their language. 

Neither do I think him gifted with the imagina- 
tion of a poet. Where shall we find, in his pro- 
ductions, that sublimity of conception which fills 
the reader with a kindred greatness of thought, 
and hurries him along at the writer's will? Where 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 975 

shall we find those daring images by which, in a 
single line, more is conveyed to the fancy than all 
the stores of language could effect ? Does he ever 
charm us with a continued stream of eloquent 
composition, on which the mind dwells with a sort 
of ravishment, reads, pauses to enjoy, reads again, 
and at last turns away from the inspiring page with 
eyes that beam forth a radiance of delight ? Are 
there in his works any of those grand and sublime 
moral truths which the memory treasures up as 
axioms, and which are expressed with an energy 
of diction corresponding to their greatness? Has 
he given us any of those terrible graces of poetry 
which harrow up the feelings, and fill us with a 
sort of convulsive admiration, an agony of delight, 
approaching to terror ; such as he feels who reads 
those lines of Milton which tell of the comfort- 
less mansions " where hope never comes ;" that 
picture of a future state in Snakspeare, where 
" the delighted spirit bathes in fiery floods ; 3> or 
even that line of his countryman, Burns, which 
describes the grey hairs of a murdered father, 
sticking to the handle of the knife with which his 
son had mangled him? 

These are flights of genius which, alone, might 
redeem volumes of dullness ; but they who took 
them, took many as noble, and some nobler. Can 
the admirers of Mr. Scott produce any thing in his 
poems which even approaches, though at a dis- 
tance, to such flights ? Can they — but I will not 

T2 



$76 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

swell these interrogatories by pursuing them 
through all the qualifications of a poet? I will 
close them by one emphatic question. It has been 
foolishly demanded, where does Mr. Scott differ 
from our greatest poets, but in the structure of his 
verse ? I ask — where does he resemble them? Let 
this be satisfactorily answered, and Mr. Scott's 
fame will then find that level now which it will 
certainly find hereafter. 

I am not Mr. Scott's enemy. I know nothing 
of him but his works. Them I have read, and I 
I suppose have read them with as little delight as 
any man in the kingdom. He is too far elevated by 
fortune and by popularity to be susceptible of any 
pain from the opinions of one so far distant from 
both as myself, or I would not tell him, that hav- 
ing read the first two cantos of his Lady of the 
Lake, from necessity, shortly after it appeared, I 
have never sine? been able, by any efforts of reso- 
lution, by any determinations of prudence, to finish 
that work. Whether this maybe reckoned my hap- 
piness or my misfortune, I will not say ; but I 
am very certain that the world (I mean Mr. Scott's 
world — his admirers), will ascribe it to something 
I may not name, because I would rather it should 
come from them than from me. 

Yet 1 can be pleased with some things that he 
has written, and have been particularly so, with 
what, perhaps, is the best thing he ever did write ; 
I mean those stanzas, in his last poem of Don 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 277 

Roderick, which begin with this line: " A vari- 
ous host, from kindred realms they came ;" and 
which contain a spirited and poetical delineation 
of the English, Scotch, and Irish characters. 

When I consider the rapidity with which Mr. 
Scott has produced his poems, I am sometimes 
tempted to think that he has formed a much j uster 
notion of his own talents than his applauders have ; 
and that, finding himself popular without inquir- 
ing how he became so, he wisely resolves to profit 
by the lucky chance before the infatuation subsides, 
andhiscommoditieslosethataccidentalvaluewhich 
fashion now bestows upon them. I may be wrong 
in this conjecture ; but I can divine no other mo- 
tive for a man's writing so many verses in so short 
a time. Were lasting fame his object I think he 
would know better how to seek it. 

This is not the place to analyse the causes of 
Mr. Scott's popularity, or the peculiarities which 
distinguish his compositions; but, as I have cen- 
sured those compositions with that freedom which 
I think becomes every man who means fairly (and 
which any man may exercise towards me with 
equal sincerity, or with less if he prefer it, with- 
out provoking the slightest emotion of resentment), 
I will not disdain to derive confidence in my opi- 
nions from the authority of others, and shall there- 
fore seek to propitiate the reader (if he happen to ad- 
mire Mr. Scott's poetry something more than I do), 
by shewing him that I do not stand quite alone. 



578 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

The following are the lines of Cumberland to 
which I referred, and to which, indeed, must be 
ascribed all the displeasure which this digression 
may excite : 

iC And was there then no patron to be found, 
But one as base and needy as thyself ? 
Ah thou, the muse of Marmion and the Lake, 
Rich as Pactolus' stream, dost thou not blush, 
To see thine elder, worthier, sister sit 
In tatter'd raiment over Goldsmith's grave, 
With that sweet * village poem' in her hand, 
Sad emblem of her poor ' deserted' bard ? 
Thou in thy banner'd hall, with kilted knights 
And elfin page, array'd in painted vest, 
Scrawl'd o'er with magic characters, devis'd 
To puzzle and surprise the gaping crowd- 
She, with no other canopy but Heav'n, 
No trophy but the amaranthine wreath, 
That binds her brow, in contemplation rapt, 
Waiting the award of ages yet to come. 

Conscious of all the peril I incur, 
I must now leave my cause to future time, 
And rest in humble hope, that what I have said, 
Posterity will sanction. Sixty years 
I've worn the livery of the true-born muse ; 
She is my rightful mistress ; her I serve : 
Witches and goblins must be chas'd away, 
And truth and nature, and the genuine taste, 
For classic purity must be restor'd, 
Ere men shall listen to the measur'd strains 
Of her melodious heav'n-strung harp again.'' 

Had Miss Seward lived to peruse these lines, 
methinks how she would have poured forth her 
wrath and indignation in a letter to some friend, 
(hereafter to be published), perhaps to Mr. Scott 
himself; and she would have felt no hesitation in 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND, §79 

pronouncing them a fresh proof that Cumberland 
was Sir Fretful Plagiary. A periodical critic, in- 
deed, has insinuated that he wrote them from the 
mingled feelings of disappointment, poverty, and 
envy. I think otherwise: I think that he penned 
them with sincere regret to see our classic models 
disregarded, and from a real wish to rouse the pub- 
lic taste from that lethargy which makes it slum- 
ber over the strains of our ancient and approved 
bards, while it is patiently receiving the fetters 
which a new race of versifiers are forging for it. 



280 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND 



CHAP. XIII 



Cumberland produces the Fashionable Lover. 
—A defence of sentimental comedy. — Menan- 
der and Terence. — The passions which pre* 
dispose to virtue more easily moved by tears than 
by smiles. — Cumberland 9 s complaints against 
the critics. — Lord Mansfield's opinion of 
an anonymous defamer .—Examination of the 
Fashionable Lover.— Total failure of the 
author in drawing the Scotch character. — Cum- 
ber land's ridicule of the citizens derived from for- 
mer dramatists , not from actual inspection. — No 
wit in this piece.— -Inconsistency of Cumberland. 

The next drama which the prolific muse of Cum- 
berland produced, was the Fashionable Lover. 
This play he seems always to have contemplated 
with much pleasure, as the happiest effort of his 
pen, and as avowedly superior both in composi- 
tion and in moral, to the West Indian. In this 
I very willingly concur ; but I do not equally con- 
cur in the author's belief, that it approaches very 
nearly to what the true style of comedy ought 
to be, — Joca non infra soccum, seria non usque 
cothurnum. 

It is a comedy of intrigue rather than of charac- 
ter, for the chief delight of the reader or spectator 
arises from the situations of its personages. It is 
precisely what the French denominate la comedie 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 28 1 

larmoyante. There is very little in it that pro- 
duces merriment; but much that calls forth the 
serious affections of our nature. " Aubrey and 
his daughter Augusta/' says Davies very justly, 
" are pathetic children of Melpomene." 

The vehement censures which some critics, and 
especially those of France, have fulminated against 
the sentimental comedy, partake more of bigotry 
than reason. Laughter and ridicule they consider 
as the legitimate weapons of comedy ; but, if vir- 
tue can be inculcated through the soft influence of 
tears ; if, by awakening the heart to tenderness, 
we can dispose it to the admission of moral truth, 
he who would deny to comedy this privilege may 
be pronounced an enemy to human happiness. 

Perhaps, indeed, it would be easy to prove that 
the mind is more apt to receive improvement, 
more calculated to acknowledge the loveliness of 
virtue, and to reject the allurements of vice, when 
the affections are aroused by the pathetic than 
when they are merely amused by the ridiculous. 
Were it my office to amend the sinner, or to con- 
firm the resolutions of the wavering penitent, I 
would seize the moment of sadness and melan- 
choly to commence my operations, rather than 
that when 

The ideot laughter keeps men's eyes, 
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment, 
A passion hateful to my purposes. 

Ridicule is not the most effective weapon with 



582 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

which to encounter depravity, Make men laugh, 
and you make them pleased ; and that with which 
they are pleased they will not abhor. Gaiety dis- 
poses the heart to contentment ; but contentment 
is a state hostile to reformation. It invests objects 
with appearances the most flattering and seducive, 
and robs them of that importance which should be- 
long to all that is connected with moral rectitude. 
With our ideas of mirth we associate somewhat of 
meanness ; for no man can laugh at and respect 
the same thing. 

One of the purposes of the drama, and its 
noblest one, is to instruct mankind ; to make them 
wiser and to make them better. Pity and terror 
are the instruments by which the tragic muse com- 
pletes her purpose ; laughter and ridicule are sup- 
posed to be the exclusive ones of the comic. To 
extend the influence of comedy, however, to 
widen the sphere of its operative power, and to 
give it additional means of doing good, is to 
exalt its nature, and without depriving it of aught 
that it already possesses to bestow upon it some- 
thing more. 

Nor by doing this can it be said that we destroy 
its peculiar character, which is a representation 
of real and familiar life. Such incidents as belong 
to sentimental comedy, those touching scenes of 
domestic woe which spring from domestic follies, 
vices, or misfortunes, are as much the picture of 
what may be found in society by actual inspection. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 283 

as any thing which has hitherto been pronounced 
the legitimate topics of the comic drama. Every 
man's experience confirms this ; and while tragedy, 
therefore, calls forth our tears alone, let it be the 
province of comedy to mingle them with our 
smiles, to awaken the serious as well as the cheer- 
ful affections of our nature, and to enforce the 
practice of virtue, by making us laugh at folly, and 
weep for the consequences of vice. 

Why, indeed, the exclusion of all tender and 
pathetic incidents should be so rigorously de- 
manded in comedy, I cannot tell. The ancients, 
from whose practice we have derived our critical 
dogmas, were not without examples of such mix- 
tures; and Menander among the Greeks, and Te- 
rence (his imitator) among the Romans, did not 
disdain to borrow from tragedy her sighs and tears. 
The Andria of Terence is preserved to us, and 
forms a decisive instance; but of Menander no- 
thing more than a few fragments have come down 
to posterity, from which no certain inference can 
be deduced. We know, however, that the Latin 
poet copied from the Greek, and hence a similarity 
of manner is presumed. 

That which has its foundation in nature, how- 
ever, no opposition can overthrow ; and senti- 
mental comedy has continued to flourish both in 
France and in England, almost to the exclusion of 
what is denominated pure comedy. I fear indeed 
that the abuse of it will soon extinguish, in this 



S84 fclFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

country, all emulation to attempt either the one 
or the other; the stage will degenerate into a 
receptacle for love-lorn tales, surprising adven- 
tures, and unnatural incidents ; and those who 
attempt to exhibit wit and humour in the de- 
lineation of character, will substitute buffoonery 
for the one, and exaggerated deformity for the 
other. 

Against this increasing depravity of dramatic 
composition, it may be mentioned as the merit 
of Cumberland, that he always opposed himself. 
He considered the cause of legitimate comedy as 
entrusted to his keeping, and whatever difference 
of opinion may exist as to the energy with which 
he fulfilled his high commission, it must at least 
be allowed that he did not wilfully betray it. He 
knew his duty, and performed it with a sincere 
and honourable zeal: how much better a better 
man might have performed it, need not be asked. 
He maintained his post to the last, and some re- 
spect is due to the fidelity of him who does all 
he can to stem the torrent which nature has denied 
him power to turn. 

Of that species of comedy which we have been 
considering, the Fashionable Lover is, perhaps, as 
pleasing a specimen as the modern theatre can 
produce. It was acted in 1772, and was well re- 
ceived. That it does not continue to be performed 
can arise only from that imperious demand for 
novelty which, like a gulph, receives all that is, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 285 

thrown into it, and into which good taste was 
thrown long ago. Who would not prefer to wit- 
ness the scenes of this play rather than the insipid 
dialogues, and monstrous absurdities with which 
an audience is presented in the dramas of Mr. 

R Mr. D Mr. H or Mr. L ?* 

In the advertisement to this play he acknow- 
ledges the assistance he received from Garrick, 
in the composition, and justly professes not to 
have exhibited any original character in it. He 
seizes the opportunity also of inveighing with his 
accustomed bitterness, against the attacks of the 
diurnal critics. In his zeal, indeed, to prove the 
danger to literature in general, of permitting their 
audacious censures, he shews that he is more con- 
cerned to secure himself from their influence than 
the rest of his brethren ; but he urges a mode of 
reasoning, in support of his opinion, somewhat 
ludicrous. 

He supposes there were, at the time he 
wrote, many men of fine talents for dramatic 
composition, who, having all the sensibility of 
genius about them, were deterred from bringing 
their talents into action by the dread of news- 
paper writers and critical pamphleteers. What a 
loss, therefore, it might be presumed, the public 
were sustaining by the tender solicitude of these 
susceptible men of genius ; and how much it was 

* If, in this instance, I have used the initials instead of the names, it is 
because the ambiguity will embrace nearly the whole of our modern dra- 
matic writers, and save me the trouble of distinct enumeration. 



286 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

to be deplored that the legislature did not devise 
some means by which persons, gifted at once with 
so much talent and so much sensibility, might be 
secure, in displaying the one, from the violation 
of the other. 

Cumberland was well persuaded that there were 
such men, because he knew " how general it is 
for men of the finest parts, to be subject to the 
finest feelings." Now, if by " the finest feelings," 
he meant those selfish feelings which begin and 
end only in the repose and happiness of their pos- 
sessor ; if he meant those feelings which are 
aroused into agony or resentment at the slightest 
breath of censure; if, in short, he meant those 
feelings which every irritated author may boast of, 
when he writhes beneath the lash of an angry cri* 
tic, (and the general tenor of the paragraph justi- 
fies no other interpretation), why then, as Cumber- 
land had those feelings to a degree sufficiently 
inimical to his peace, and as he felt every mode of 
reproof with such acuteness, that Garrick used to 
call him the " man without a skin," it follows, 
by a simple process of induction, that he thought 
himself a " man of the finest parts," as he cer- 
tainly had what he considered as the criterion of 
them, a morbid irritability of mind. 

This inference, indeed, is supported by a dis- 
tinct avowal of Cumberland's, in the very same 
paragraph, whence I have extracted the preceding 
sentence, " Whether the reception of this co- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 287 

medy, 5> says he, " may be such as shall encou- 
rage me to future efforts, is of small consequence 
to the public ; but if it should chance to obtain 
some little credit with the candid part of mankind, 
and its author, for once, escape without those per- 
sonal and unworthy aspersions, which writers, who 
hide their own names, fling on them who publish 
theirs, my success, it may be hoped, will draw 
forth others to the undertaking with far superior 
abilities, &c/' 

I am certain the conclusion of this hypothetical 
sentence does not accord with the reader's precon- 
ception of what was to come. But while Cumber- 
land shewed he was thus sensible to attacks, could 
he doubt that there would be plenty to attack 
him ? The pleasure of every undertaking consists 
partly in its success; and they who live by ca- 
lumnies and scurrility, are always pleased to see 
that they succeed in their vocation. Nothing 
will sooner silence the tongue of defamation than 
contempt; but if a man runs about to tell his 
neighbours what has been said of him, or if he 
writes and tells the world how he has been tra- 
duced, he becomes the pander to his own disgrace, 
he gives the slander circulation, and invites society 
to be present at a feast where his own heart and 
character ^are served up for the repast. Be to the 
storm insensible, and the storm cannot hurt you ; 
but if you weep and sigh at every blast that 



2SS LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

whistles round your defenceless head, you are at 
once its victim and its sport. 

Lord Mansfield formed a just notion of proce- 
dure in these cases. " If," said he to Cum- 
berland on a certain occasion, " a single syllable 
from my pen could at once confute an anonymous 
defamer, I would not gratify him with the word." 
Would all mankind adopt this lofty principle, we 
should soon see the herd of libellers perishing in 
the filth of their own imaginations, which now is 
quickened into vitality by the warmth of opposi- 
tion. 

Before passing on to the examination of the 
Fashionable Lover , I will stop to applaud the 
prologue, which is written with much gaiety, and 
even with some degree of wit ; though, perhaps, 
Johnson would have said it has more profanity 
than wit. As it is not to be found in all editions 
of the play, the reader may not be displeased, per- 
haps, to see it here. It was spoken by Mr. Wes- 
ton, in the character of a Printer s Devil. 

lc I am a devil, so please you — and must hoof 

Up to the poet yonder with this proof ; 

I'd read it to you : but, in faith, 'tis odds 

For one poor devil to face so many Gods. 

A ready imp I am, who kindly greets 

Young* authors with their first exploits in sheets ; 

While the press groans, in place of dry nurse stands, 

And takes the bantling from the midwife's hands, 

If any author of prolific brains, 
In this good company feels labour pains ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 289 

If any gentle poet, big with rime, 
Has run his reckoning out, and gone his time ! 
If any critic pregnant with ill nature, 
Cries out to be deliver'd of his satire, 
Know such, that at our hospital of muses, 
He may lie in, in private, if he chuses : 
We've single lodgings there for secret sinners, 
With good encouragement for young beginners. 

Here's one now that is free enough in reason ; 
This bard breeds regularly once a season ; 
Three of a sort, of homely form and feature, 
The plain coarse progeny of humble nature ; 
Home bred and born ; no strangers he displays, 
Nor tortures free-born limbs in stiff French stays ; 
Two you have rear'd, but, between you and me, 
This youngest is the fav'rite of the three. 
Nine tedious months he bore this babe about, 
Let it, in charity, live nine nights out ; 
Stay but his month up ; give some little law ; 
'Tis cowardly to attack him in the straw. 

Dear gentlemen correctors, be more civil ; 
Kind courteous sirs, take council of the devil ; 
Stop your abuse, for while your readers see 
Such malice, they impute your works to me ; 
Thus, while you gather no one sprig of fame, 
Your poor unhappy friend is put to shame ; 
Faith, Sirs, you should have some consideration, 
When e'en the devil pleads against damnation. 



The action of this comedy is contrived with 
considerable skill, though not with so much as 
might be wished. The arrival of Aubrey just time 
enough to meet Colin, who had before been just 
in time to meet his daughter, are concurrences too 
marked and too convenient for the author, to satisfy 
the spectator. The effect which they produce might 

U 



t?90 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

have been accomplished by circumstances some- 
what more probably connected. 

This, however, does not diminish the general 
interest of the fable. The distresses of Augusta, 
and her perils, awaken the tenderest emotions ; 
while her final preservation from them, and her 
union with the man, whom she loves, but who 
hardly deserves her from his hasty belief of her 
criminality, diffuse that calm satisfaction through 
the mind which always accompanies the view of 
innocence and virtue triumphant. 

Of the characters of this play there remains 
something to be said ; and first, of that wherein 
the author has utterly failed— Colin Macleod. 

How he came to attempt the portraiture of a 
Scotchman, he has himself told us : 

" In one of these meetings," says he (which 
were held at the British Coffee-house, and fre- 
quented by Garrick, Goldsmith, Beattie, Foote, 
&c.) " it was suggested and recommended to me 
to take up the character of a North Briton, as I 
had those of an Irishman and West Indian. I ob- 
served, in answer to this, that I had not the same 
chance for success as I had in my sketch of 
OFlaherty, for I had never resided in Scotland, 
and should be perfectly to seek for the dialect of 
my hero. ' How could that be/ Fitzherbert ob- 
served, ; when I was in the very place to find it,' 
(alluding to the British Coffee-house, and the 
company we were in) * however/ he added 'give 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 291 

your Scotchman character, and take your chance 
for dialect ; if you bring a Roman on the stage, 
you don't make him speak Latin/* — c No> no/ 
cried Foote, c and if you don't make him wear 
breeches, Garrick will be much obliged to you. 
When I was at Stranraer I went to the Kirk, 
where the Mess John was declaiming most furi- 
ously against luxury, and, as heaven shall judge 
me, there was not a pair of shoes in the whole 
congregation/ " 

From this accidental suggestion Cumberland 
imprudently sat down to the task of delineating a 
Scotchman, and his success was in proportion to 
his presumption. Whoever has been in Scotland, 
whoever is familiar with the writers in the Scottish 
dialect, and above all, a Scotchman himself, will 
be thoroughly disgusted with the Colin Macleod 
of Cumberland. He says he had no other guide 
for the dialect than what the Scotch characters on 
the stage supplied him with ; but even of these he 
did not make the use he might. Had he merely 
copied from Mrs.Centlivre he would have avoided 
much that now offends ; her character of Gibby in 

* A frivolous observation. We do not make a Roman speak Latin, 
because it is now a dead language, and the individual no longer represents 
a nation. Rut to depict a Scotchman, an Irishman, or a Welchman, as such, 
and deprive them of that dialect by which they are distinguished from their 
fellow subjects, is as absurd as if a Welchman, Irishman, or Scotchman, 
were to write a drama in their native language, and introduce an English- 
man speaking it with propriety. Where would be the fine satirical humor 
of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant's character, if M ackiin had written from 
such rules ? 

U2 



292 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the Wonder, is drawn with remarkable accuracy, 
and was, perhaps, till Macklin wrote, the best por- 
trait of a Scotchman which the stage possessed. 

Cumberland was acquainted neither with the 
sentiments nor the dialect of a Scotchman, nor 
even with the orthography of his dialect. When 
he had diversified it with a few such familiar and 
vulgar phrases as " Hoot mon" — " The de'el burst 
your weam" — " Muckle need" — "Lassie" — "Had 
na\ could na*," &c. he fancied he was skilfully 
exhibiting the phraseology of a Highlander. How 
greatly he failed, however, is now better known 
than when he wrote, for the genius of Burns has 
familiarised a great portion of southern readers 
with a form of speech which had been, heretofore, 
regarded rather as the amusement of an antiquary 
to unravel, than of a student in polite literature to 
enjoy. He was, indeed, supremely ignorant of 
what he laboured to display ; and when he hap- 
pened to catch a Scottish word or phrase, he knew 
not how to spell it. 

Among the other characters, Bridgemore and 
his family stand conspicuous. These were selected 
from a class in society (the citizens), whom it had 
long been the fashion with dramatic writers to pour- 
tray with every aggravation of meanness, vulgarity, 
and absurdity. Cuckoldom, whoredom, bestiality, 
gluttony, ignorance, and a preposterous imitation 
of pride, were considered as the indigenous growth 
of the city; from thence, as from avast storehouse. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 993 

the satirist, the lampooner, the humourist, and the 
painter, transplanted his characters, and they be- 
came at last such hereditary stock in the hands of 
successive generations, that it was never inquired 
by what right it was first obtained or afterwards held. 

There can be no doubt that men who had risen 
to affluence by the accumulations of trade, men 
of obscure origin, of narrow minds, neglected 
education, and plebeian manners, would, when 
wealth gave them importance, display that im- 
portance in various modes of absurdity and arro- 
gance. He who crawls into day-light through 
a common sewer, will carry about him the marks 
of his progress ; and he whose qualifications fit 
him only for the subordinate stations of life, will 
not appear, in the eye of taste or reason, any thing 
nearer to dignity or grace because he now possesses 
a thousand pounds where once he possessed a gui- 
nea. The original stamp of his extraction will re- 
main upon him, uneffaced by his gold, his splen- 
dor, or his extravagance. 

This would be particularly the case when the 
trading part of the community was separated from 
the higher classes of society by distinct and visible 
barriers ; when the pursuit of commerce was re- 
garded as ignoble, and its agents as a community 
of beings merely useful as they administered to the 
luxuries of the great. It would be the case too, 
when, education not being generally diffused, no 
more of it was obtained by the tradesman than 



294 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

what enabled him to post his ledger, and compre- 
hend the details of his business ; and as the exclu- 
sion from polished society was the result of this 
comparative degradation, it naturally followed 
that these proscribed individuals would form a 
distinct class, to which would belong manners, 
habits, ceremonies, and even language, peculiar to 
Itself; these manners and this language, tried 
by the standard of courtly and Patrician life, would 
seem, as in factthey were,vulgar and ridiculous ; and 
they would appear more conspicuously so, because 
commonly united with a degree of wealth which 
enabled them to invite attention by awkward pomp 
and obtrusive splendour. Hence they have been 
adopted, by the muse of comedy, as fit objects to 
provoke laughter; and it seemed that ridicule 
could not transgress its limits in depicting those 
whose preposterous follies defied all exaggeration. 

But the progress of refinement has been gra- 
dually softening all these asperities, and blending 
the character of the merchant and the gentleman 
into one ; till now, in the present day, a British 
trader feels himself, and justly too, upon a proud 
equality with title, rank, and fortune, nor need he 
blush at the comparison. His education, his ha- 
bits, his probity, his manners, and conversation, 
place him on that level, while his spirit of enter- 
prise, his liberal policy, and extensive know- 
ledge make him a more useful member of society. 

This honourable and beneficial change had been 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 29«5 

operated, however, long before the name of a 
citizen ceased to be synonimous, in the vocabulary 
of a dramatist, with all that was despicable, un- 
manly, and absurd. When Cumberland wrote, 
indeed, I doubt if he could have paralleled his 
character of Bridgemore in the whole range of the 
city ; yet, he makes him just what all dramatists 
had made a citizen before him, and puts into his 
mouth the same hereditary cant which his 
brethren had employed for a series of years. 
He and his family are as vulgar, as mercenary, as 
dishonest, and as preposterous, as they could have 
been made had Tom Durfey held the pen : but 
he would have given them a little more in- 
decency, perhaps, and thus have completed the 
picture. 

How far it may be considered rational to have 
ridiculed, with such unrelenting severity, a class 
of men to whom a commercial country, like this, 
must owe its greatness, its power, and its very ex- 
istence, I will not stay to inquire : but I am happy 
to add that the prejudice is now fast disappearing, 
actually borne down by the increased and increasing 
respectability and importance of its objects, and 
that no dramatist would now think it prudent or 
necessary to waste such buffoonery upon a citizen 
as was once not only tolerated but enjoyed. 

The next character that demands some notice 
is Mortimer's. He is a humourist who bears 
some affinity to the Sir William Thornhill of 



296 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Goldsmith; a man who does good without the 
reputation of goodness, concealing his virtues 
beneath the rough mask of cynical austerity: 
whose heart and affections are benevolently warm, 
but whose manners repel the approach of those 
miseries they would relieve. His asperity some- 
times degenerates into folly, as when Aubrey con- 
gratulates him upon the society he finds in his 
books, and he replies, " that truly their company 
is more tolerable than that of their authors would 
be ; I can bear them on my shelves, though I 
should be sorry to see the impertinent puppies 
who wrote them." This is not the humour of an 
eccentric man, but the dullness of a foolish one ; 
of a man who thinks that to say something which 
contradicts received opinions, is a proof of 
wisdom. 

Nor is it necessary that a humourist should be 
converted into a very silly jester : yet, Mortimer 
appears in this light, when he exclaims, after 
hearing of his nephew's intentions to marry, — 
" A wife ! 'sdeath, sure some planetary madness 
reigns amongst our wives : the dog-star never 
sets, and the moon's horns are fallen on our 
heads/' 

Notwithstanding, however, these and some 
similar defects in the character of Mortimer, it is 
one that pleases, from the contrast which it 
contains between real goodness and assumed 
austerity. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 297 

Cumberland was not very often successful when 
he strove to be witty. His talents were rather 
solid than shining : and the reader is often dis- 
pleased with his abortive attempts at brilliancy. 
Thus, in the play before me, the Frenchman is 
made to ask of Colin why he sent away the horns, 
and adds, " it is very much the ton in this country 
for the fine gentlemen to have the horns :" in 
which remark I have no doubt that Cumberland 
meant to convey a witty allusion : but though the 
allusion is obvious, the wit, to me, is hidden. 

The other characters require no specific exami- 
nation. Lord Abberville is merely a fashionable 
scoundrel, who, of course, reforms before the fifth 
act ends ; Tyrrel is a lover, much resembling his 
generation on the stage ; and Dr. Druid a Welch 
antiquary without humour enough to make him 
interesting. Aubrey is little seen ; but his daugh- 
ter maintains a firm hold over the affections 
from the first to the last. Her interview with her 
father is well conducted, and overpowers the 
feelings ; and the author has concluded it with a 
reflection in the character of Mortimer which I 
think a very fine one. 

" Look at that girl," he says, pointing to the 
fainting Augusta, overwhelmed with the sudden 
discovery of her father, " 'tis thus mortality en- 
counters happiness ; 'tis thus the inhabitant of 
earth meets that of heaven, with tears, with 



295 J.IFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

faintings, with surprise. Let others call this the 
weakness of our nature : to me it proves the un- 
worthiness ; for had we merits to entitle us to 
happiness, the means would not be wanting to 
enjoy it." 

The language of this drama is constructed with 
greater attention to what the diction of comedy 
should be than is observable in the West Indian, 
Cumberland was aware of this himself, and has 
insinuated his preference of the present play, to 
either of his preceding ones, in the prologue ; 
while in his Memoirs he seems to consider it as the 
very best of his dramatic progeny. The dialogue is, 
in general, easy, natural, and elegant, and the sen- 
timents are appropriated to the characters with 
considerable judgment. He offends, however, 
against grammatical construction, in several in- 
stances similar to those which I have enumerated 
in speaking of the West Indian, and therefore I 
may pass them over here. If I could believe a 
scholar capable of such errors upon principle, I 
should be strongly tempted to think that Cum- 
berland committed them from the influence of 
some peculiar notions which he might have upon 
the subject: but I suppose they are rather to be 
ascribed to negligence. 

Cumberland has, on various occasions, assumed 
to himself the merit of having inculcated by pre- 
cept, and enforced by example, that courtesy and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. $99 

benevolence which forbid the ridiculing of in- 
dividuals merely on account of their country ; and 
hence his characters of O y Flaherty and Macleod 
were intended to associate in our minds notions 
of dignity and worth with the idea of a dramatic 
Irish and Scotchman. At a later period he en- 
deavoured to perform the same benefit for the Jew, 
both in his Observer, and in his comedy of that 
name ; but, why his philanthropy was once with- 
held from that devoted race of beings, as in the 
play I have been considering, or why a Welchman 
was excluded from the general amnesty that was 
so ostentatiously vaunted by the author, I know 
not. To a Welchman indeed, his antipathy seems 
to have been rooted ; for not contented with 
making his foolish antiquary Dr. Druid, of that 
country, he afterwards selected the same people 
for the characters of his John De Lancaster, and 
has exhibited them with no very amiable qualities. 
Yet, he says, in the person of Mortimer, referring 
to these national reflections, " he would rather weed 
out one such unmanly prejudice from the hearts 
of his countrymen than add another Indies to their 
empire. ,, 

Such was his consistency in this respect, and 
so much easier is it to believe ourselves acting in 
conformity with our professions than to do it. I 
know, indeed, that a man is not to be compared 
too rigorously with his own sentiments: for as 



300 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

much as our conceptions of virtue transcend our 
practice, so much will our practice differ from our 
own declarations ; nor should I have adverted to 
this deviation in Cumberland, had he not en~ 
forced his claim with so much confidence. 






LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 301 

CHAP. XIV. 

Cumberland* s literary enterprises suspended for a 
time by the death of his parents. — His account of 
that event. — Produces the Choleric Man. — 
Examination of this play. — Does not discrimi- 
nate between accidental anger and general pas- 
sion. — Dedicates the play to Detraction. — 
Observation of Murphy's — Cumberland thinks 
it the best of his dramas. — Examples of its defi- 
ciency in point and spirit. — Writes and publishes 
two Odes. — Alters and spoils Shakspeare's 
Tim on of Athens . — The opinions o/Murphy 
and D ay ies upon this alteration. 

The literary enterprises of Cumberland now suf- 
fered some interruption from the death of his father 
and mother, which happened so immediately to- 
gether, that his mind must have keenly felt the 
stroke. Where there has existed a cordial and 
reciprocal affection between a child and his pa- 
rents, where that affection has ripened into rational 
veneration, founded upon a real appreciation of 
the virtues of its object, and where it springs both 
from the recollection of past services and endear- 
ments, and from the consciousness of a pious 
duty, there are few events in this world more 
dreadful, more severely proportioned to our powers 
of endurance, than the death of such parents. We 
feel the eternal separation with more than filial 



302 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

sorrow, and mingle with our tears the bitterness of 
remembering that we have lost the friend, and the 
companion, as well as the father and benefactor. 
It is, then, indeed, that the quaint but emphatic 
line of Young becomes a moral truth: 

" When such friends part — 'tis the survivor dies." 

Cumberland's father had been translated to the 
see of Kilmore, and gained, by the exchange, a 
better house to live in, and a race of beings, some- 
what more civilized, to control. The annual visits 
of his son had never been intermitted, and thus, 
perhaps, he found the wish nearest his heart amply 
gratified. But the decay of his bodily health became 
more and more visible to Cumberland, as each re- 
turning summer conveyed him to the paternal roof: 
and he saw this decay with foreboding thoughts, that 
were, too soon verified. The uniform temperance of 
his father's life, left indeed every ground for hope 
which can be derived from the advantages of a 
constitution not debilitated by excesses : but the 
phenomena of life are reducible to no immutable 
laws ; we sometimes see the man whose clays have 
been but a round of debauch flourishing in a 
vigorous old age, while he whose temperate 
wishes never hurried him beyond the wholesome 
bounds of moderation, drops into the grave in 
comparative youth. 

The Bishop of Kilmore was one of nature's 
most abstemious children. " In all his appetites 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 303 

and passions," says Cumberland, " he was the 
most moderate of men." His death was gradual 
and gentle ; but at what period it took place, 
Cumberland, with his accustomed and absurd 
negligence with regard to dates, leaves in uncer- 
tainty. It was somewhere, however, near the 
period when his comedy of the Fashionable Lover 
was produced, and that was in the year 1772. 
What he says upon this melancholy event the 
reader may, perhaps, wish to see. 

" In the winter of that same year, whilst I was 
at Bath by advice, for my own health, I received 
the first afflicting intelligence of his death from 
Primate Robinson, who loved him truly and la- 
mented him most sincerely. This sad event was 
speedily succeeded by the death of my mother, 
whose weak and exhausted frame sunk under the 
blow : those senses so acute, and that mind so 
richly endowed, were in an instant taken from her, 
and after languishing in that melancholy state for 
a short but distressful period, she followed him to 
the grave. 

" Thus was I bereft of father and mother with- 
out the consolation of having paid them the last 
mournful duties of a son. One surviving sister^ 
the best and most benevolent of human beings, 
attended them in their last moments, and performed 
those duties, which my hard fortune would not 
suffer me to share. 

" In a small patch of ground, enclosed with 



304 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

stone walls, adjoining to the church-yard of Kil- 
more, but not within the pale of the consecrated 
ground, my father's corpse was interred beside the 
grave of the venerable and exemplary Bishop 
Bedel. This little spot, as containing the remains 
of that good and great man, my father had fenced 
and guarded with particular devotion, and he had 
more than once pointed it out to me as his destined 
grave, saying to me, as I well remember, in the 
words of the Old Prophet of Beth-el, " When I 
am dead, then bury me in this sepulchre, wherein 
the man of God is buried ; lay my bones beside 
his bones." This injunction was exactly fulfilled, 
and the protestant Bishop of Kilmore, the* mild 
friend of mankind, the impartial benefactor and 
unprejudiced protector of his Catholic poor, who 
almost adored him whilst living, was not per- 
mitted to deposit his remains within the precincts 
of his own church-yard, though they howled over 
his grave, and rent the air with their savage 
lamentations. 

" Thus, whilst their carcasses monopolise the 
consecrated ground, his bones and the bones of 
Bedel make sacred the unblest soil, in which they 
moulder; but whilst I believe and am persuaded, 
that his incorruptible is received into bliss eternal, 
what concerns it me where his corruptible is laid ? 
The corpse of my lamented mother, the instructress 
of my youth, the friend and charm of my maturer 
years, is deposited by his side. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 30 

" My father's patronage at Kilmore was very 
considerable, and this he strictly bestowed upon 
the clergy of his diocese, promoting the curates to 
the smaller livings, as vacancies occurred, and 
exacting from every man, whom he put into a 
living, where there was no parsonage-house, a 
solemn promise to build ; but I am sorry to say 
that in no single instance was that promise ful- 
filled ; which breach of faith gave him great con- 
cern, and in the cases of some particular friends? 
whom he had promoted in full persuasion of their 
keeping faith with him, afflicted him very sensibly, 
as I had occasion to know and lament. The op- 
portunities he had of benefiting his fortune and 
family by fines, and the lapse of leases," which 
might have been considerable, he honourably de- 
clined to avail himself of, for when he had tendered 
his renewals upon the most moderate terms, and 
these had been delayed or rejected in his days of 
health, he peremptorily withstood their offers, 
when he found his life was hastening to its period 
esteeming it according to his high sense of honour 
not perfectly fair to his successor to take what he 
called the packing-penny, and sweep clean be- 
fore his departure. He left his see, therefore, 
much more valuable than he found it, by this 
liberal and disinterested conduct, by which it w r as 
natural to hope he had secured to his executors 
the good offices and assistance of his successor 
in recovering the outstanding arrears due to his 

X 



306 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

survivors — but in that hope we were shamefully 
disappointed ; neither these arrears, nor even his 
legal demands for monies expended on improve- 
ments, beneficial to the demesne, and regularly 
certified by his diocesan, could be recovered by me 
for my sister's use, till the Lord Primate took the 
cause in hand, and enforced the sluggish and un- 
willing satisfaction from the bishop, who succeeded 
him." 

When he had leisure from his grief to resume 
the operations of his pen, he sat down to the 
composition of The Choleric Man, and in 1775 it 
was produced on the stage of Drury-Lane. It was 
successful, and perhaps deserved to be so ; but it 
is executed with less uniformity of skill than was 
displayed in his West Indian and Fashionable 
Lover. 

In the character of The Choleric Man, (Night- 
shade,) he lost the opportunity which he pos- 
sessed, of exhibiting the passion of anger as a 
prevailing quality, by making him always in a 
passion, and too often without sufficient or appa- 
rent provocation : he is rather an outrageous bully 
whom nothing can please, than a man of morbid 
irritability whom most things can displease. Had 
he looked abroad upon life, he would have found 
no such being as his choleric man, for no indivi- 
dual exists in a constant whirlwind of passion : no 
individual exists, (out of Bedlam at least) who has 
so far subdued his reason to the exacerbations of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 307 

a violent temper, that he raves with fury if he be 
contradicted, and yet extols his own patience and 
meekness. 

This he would not have found : but he might 
have found, and too easily, indeed, for the hap- 
piness of mankind, men whom long indulgence in 
their own excesses has so corrupted, that they de- 
form every scheme of social life, into which they 
are permitted to intrude, with storm and tempest ; 
men who have pampered themselves into habits of 
such bloated arrogance, that they despise all the 
blandishments of society, and, like wayward chil- 
dren who annoy one into compliance, they enforce 
a toleration of their excesses because to contend 
with their exactions would be to provoke greater 
evils than are sought to be avoided. Yet even 
these men have their intervals of calm and quiet: 
for it commonly happens that their anger is roused 
by the application of peculiar behaviour, or the 
discussion of peculiar topics, as it is often found 
that insanity manifests itself only when a particular 
idea is forced upon the attention. They are not 
always angry, like the Choleric Man of Cumber- 
land, but sometimes assume the appearance and 
have the reality of reason. 

To have discriminated this difference would have 
afforded scope for a fine display of character, by 
exhibiting the inconsistences into which the same 
man may be betrayed who is, at one time, the slave 
of violence, and at another the creature of reason* 

X2 



308 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

From such a character, also, he might have deduced 
a just moral, by contrasting the virtues of his calm 
moments with the vices and follies of his enraged 
ones ; and shewing that there is no security in the 
integrity of a passionate man by making him annul, 
or destroy, the efficacy of those beneficent actions 
which he may have performed in the cool mo- 
ments of deliberate and rational conduct. 

This was what the author might have done with 
such a character, instead of which he has exhibited 
merely an impetuous ruffian,whose reformation is at 
last produced by an act of violence committed from 
such an idle provocation, or rather from no provo- 
cation at all, that both the reader and the spectator 
despise the extravagance of the incident. 

The remaining personages of this play may be 
dismissed without much examination. The two 
brothers are opposed to each other with such 
an obvious contrast of sentiments and conduct, 
that we know the author's intention must have 
been merely to produce an antithesis of cha- 
racter, if I may be allowed the expression : for, 
such fraternal contrariety is seldom witnessed in 
actual life. They seem to have been drawn in 
imitation of those artificially contrasted characters 
which are to be found in the pla} r s of our best dra- 
matists, but which always betray a poverty of inven- 
tion. It is so easy, when one brother is calm and 
placid, to make the other rough and boisterous, or 
if one be crafty and insidious to pourtray the other 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 309 

open, ingenuous, and unsuspecting, that a superior 
writer might justly despise such an expedient for 
its facility: while it might be worthy of his 
highest ambition to discriminate them by those 
delicate and almost evanescent shades of character 
which gradually blend into each other like the 
prismatic colours, and yet are distinguished one 
from the other. 

Cumberland, however, thought differently upon 
this subject, and speaks of the " comic force" 
with which the contrast between the two brothers 
is supported, while he seems to applaud the in- 
vention that contrived that contrast. But an 
author has long been reputed the very worst judge 
of his own works, whence, perhaps, the reason that 
Cumberland says, of the present play, " that the 
characters are humorously contrasted, and there is 
point and spirit in the dialogue ;" and that, if ever 
an editor shall, hereafter, make a collection of his 
dramas, this * c will stand forward as one of the 
most prominent among them/' To this opinion, 
thus modestly expressed, I must object from a 
strong conviction, in my own mind, that the dia- 
logue has neither point nor spirit. 

Perhaps, what the author has dignified with these 
appellations, may appear to others dull and vapid ; 
as, for example, when Manlove inquires of his 
clerk what fee he received with a case from a 
tailor, who asks how he is to proceed against his 
wife for adultery: the clerk replies, " a light 



310 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

guinea," and Manlove answers, " tis more than a 
light woman deserves" — and adds, in a strain of 
equal wit and raillery, " give the tailor his guinea 
again ; bid him proceed to his work, and leave a 
good for nothing wife to go on with hers; and 
hark'ee Frampton, you seem to want a new coat, 
suppose you let him take your measure : the fellow, 
you see, would fain be cutting out work for the 
lawyers." 

I have no doubt that when Cumberland wrote 
this, he conceived he was producing a witty ob- 
servation ; but I greatly doubt whether any per- 
son ever thought so besides himself. 

Neither can I much commend the point of the 
following remark. 

" I must believe," says Letitia, " that no man 
would descend from the character of a gentleman, 
who was not wanting in the requisites that go to 
the support of it." 

If a man want that which is essential to any 
thing, he cannot surely be said to possess it: and 
if he do not possess it, how can. he forfeit the 
possession ? 

If it were to such felicities of composition that 
Cumberland alluded, when he pronounced so fa- 
vourably of this play, the question is decided : but 
probably he might mistake a dialogue approaching 
nearly to licentiousness for point and spirit, in 
which case I can suppose he had in his mind the 
scene between Letitia, Mrs. Stapleton, and Jack 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 311 

Nightshade, in the picture-room : a scene no less 
distinguished for its absurdity of exaggerated 
ignorance, than for a strain of conversation that 
treads upon the very heels of indecency, and is 
preposterously uttered in the presence of a young- 
lady, un reproved by her or the matron who ac- 
companies her. 

The citizens, and especially the aldermen, must 
have felt themselves greatly indebted to the 
courtesy of Cumberland, when he consigned them 
all to the honours of cuckoldom in one compre- 
hensive inference. When the choleric man breaks 
the head of a horn-blower, and inquires of his 
servant in what state the wound is, he replies, 
" he would not have such a star in his forehead, 
to be the richest alderman in the city of London/' 
to which his master rejoins, " tis a pity but he had 
been one, for then his horns might have warded off 
the blow." It may be that even this was ac- 
counted spirit and point by the writer : but I 
should be sorry to pronounce it such. 

To this comedy is prefixed a long dissertation 
which he calls a Dedication to Detraction. It is 
not written with much humour, but it shews how 
keenly he smarted from contemporary criticism, 
and how anxious he was to persuade the world 
that he did not feel at all. There is some erudition 
idly lavished upon a topic which did not deserve 
consideration, and which seems to have been pro- 
duced rather as an ostentatious display of hisintel- 



312 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

lectual stores than from any necessity that was 
forced upon him by personal considerations. It was 
pertinently observed by Murphy, who mentions 
this play in his life of Garrick, " that if the reader 
wished to have the true idea of a Choleric Man, 
he would find it in the Dedication to Detraction, 
prefixed to the play." 

His next undertaking was to write and publish, 
in 1776, two odes, one to the sun, written at 
Keswick, and invoking the appearance of that 
luminary which did not shine often enough for 
the author's accommodation, and the other to Dr. 
James, eulogising his powders because they cured 
Cumberland's son of a dangerous fever. Of these 
twin productions I know no more than what may 
be learned from the extracts which Cumberland 
has preserved in his Memoirs, and they do not 
excite any wish to increase my knowledge. 

To the sun he says, 

* f Soul of the world, refulgent sun, 
Oh take not from my ravish' d sight, 
Those golden beams of living light, 
Nor, ere thy golden course be run 

Precipitate the night. 
Lo, where the ruffian clouds arise, 
Usurp the abdicated skies, 
And seize th' ethereal throne ; 
Sullen sad the scene appears, 
Huge Helvellyn streams with tears .■ 
Hark! 'tis giant Skiddaw's groan ; 
I hear terrific Lawdoor roar ; 
The sabbath of thy reign is o'er, 
The anarchy's begun ; 
Father of light return : break forth refulgent sun '." 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 313 

In the ode to Dr. James is the following de- 
scription of the person of death : 

" On his pale steed erect the monarch stands, 
His dirk and javelin glittering in his hands ; 
This from a distance deals th' ignoble blow, 
And that despatches the resisting foe : 

Whilst all beneath him, as he flies, 

Dire are the tossings, deep the cries, 
The landscape darkens and the season dies," 

In these lines there is nothing to commend. The 
best parts are those which he has taken from 
other writers, for I trace, in them, the acknow- 
ledged property of Milton, Addison, and Mason. 

These odes, when published, being addressed 
to Romney, who was then lately returned from 
pursuing his studies at Rome, Johnson ob- 
served that they were made to carry double, as 
being subsidiary to the fame of another man : but 
when he allowed that " they would have been 
thought as good as odes commonly are, if Cum- 
berland had not put his name to them," I suppose 
he intended an indirect depreciation of Gray. 

In the ensuing year ( 1777) he turned his thoughts 
towards altering one of Shakspeare's plays, (Timon 
of Athens) and adapting it for the modern stage. 
This had already been attempted by Shadwell 
in 1678, and by Love in 1768 : but in neither 
case was the project successful, and Cumberland's 
shared the fate of its precursors. To amend 
Shakspeare, indeed, is a task which demands no 



314 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

ordinary powers of mind, and though it has been 
done with some sort of plausibility, where the strong 
interest of the piece has overcome the defects of 
mutilations, transpositions, and omissions, (as in 
Richard the Third, the Tempest, and King Lear) 
it will hardly be endured, when the chief delight 
of the reader or spectator arises from the majesty 
of Shakspeare's thoughts, and the matchless excel- 
lence of his language, as is peculiarly the case in 
Timon of Athens, The fable of this play is less 
intricate than most of Shakspeare's ; but the flashes 
of genius that illumine the whole, the profound 
knowledge of life which is displayed in the 
speeches of Timon, his caustic severity of satire, 
his manly fulminations against the herd of parasites 
who surrounded him, and his nobleness of nature 
in the midst of all his excesses, are touches so pe- 
culiarly Shakspeare's that no man can successfully 
incorporate any thing of his own with them. How 
Cumberland has succeeded let the following speci- 
men testify : 

"Act II. Scene III. 

'* Lucullus and Lucius. 

Lucid. — How now, my Lord? in private? 
Lue. — Yes, I thought so, 

Till an unwelcome intermeddling Lord 

Stept in and ask'd the question. 
Lucid. — -What, in anger ! 

By heav'ns I'll gall him 1 for he stands before me 

In the broad sunshine of Lord Timon's bounty, 

And throws my better merits into shade. (Aside) . 

Lite. — Now would I kill him if I durst. (.hide). 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 315 

Lucul— Methinks 

You look but coldly. What has cross'd your suit ? 

Alas, poor Lucius ! but I read your fate 

In that unkind one's frown. 
Luc— No doubt, my Lord, 

You, that receive them ever, are well-vers'd 

In the unkind-one's frowns : as the clear stream 

Reflects your person, so may you espy 

In the sure mirror of her scornful brow 

The clouded picture of your own despair., 
Lucul. — Come, you presume too far ; talk not thus idly 

To me, who know you. 
Luc. — Know me ? 
LucuL— -Aye, who know you, 

For one, that courses up and down on errands, 

A stale retainer at Lord Timon's table ; 

A man grown great by making legs and cringes, 

By winding round a wanton spendthrift's heart, 

And gulling him at pleasure— Now do I know you ? 
Luc— Gods, must I bear this ? bear it from Lucullus ! 

I, who first brought thee to Lord Timon's stirrup, 

Set thee in sight, and breath'd into thine ear 

The breath of hope ? What hadst thou been, ingrateful, 

But that I took up Jove's imperfect work, 

Gave thee a shape, and made thee into man? 

Alcibiades to them. 
Alcib. — What, wrangling, Lords, like hungry curs for crusts ? 

Away with this unmanly war of words ! 

Pluck forth your shining rapiers from their shells, 

And level boldly at each other's hearts. 

Hearts did I say ? Your hearts are gone from home, 

And hid in Timon's coffers— Fie upon it ! 
Luc. — My Lord Lucullus, I shall find a time. 
Alcib. — Hah ! find a time ! the brave make time and place. 

Gods, gods, Avhat things are men ! you'll find a time ? 

A time for what ? — To murder him in's sleep ? 

The man, who wrongs me, at the altar's foot 

I'll seize, yea, drag him from the shelt'ring aegis 

Of stern Minerva. 
Luc. — Aye ; 'tis your profession. 
Alcib.—- Down on your knees, and thank the gods for that, 



316 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Or woe for Athens, were it left to such 

As you are to defend. Do ye not hate 

Each other heartily ? Yet neither dares 

To bear his trembling falchion to the sun. 

How tame they dangle on your coward thighs I 
JLucul.—We are no soldiers, Sir. 
Alcib. — No, ye are Lords ; 

A lazy, proud, unprofitable crew ; 

The vermin gender'd from the rank corruption 

Of a luxurious state — No soldiers, say you ? 

And wherefore are ye none ? Have ye not life, 

Friends, honour, freedom, country, to defend ? 

He, that hath these, by nature is a soldier, 

And, when he wields his sword in their defence, 

Instinctively fulfils the end he lives for.—" 
&c. &c. 

This is Cumberland's own ; and how it accords 
with the sentiments and language of Shakspeare, 
I need not tell. The piece was acted however, 
but it met with a cold reception, though sup- 
ported by the talents of Mr. and Mrs. Barry. The 
opinion of its failure has been uniformly expressed 
by all who have mentioned the undertaking. 
" What Mr. Cumberland did to such a play," says 
Murphy, " or how he contrived to mangle it, is 
now not worth the trouble of enquiring." 

" Those who have read Shad well's Timon," ob- 
serves Davies, in his Life of Garrick, (and his opi- 
nion upon a question of theatrical adaptation is 
entitled to respect), " will not, I believe, scruple to 
prefer it to Mr. Cumberland's, though both the 
aiterers had better have forborne a task to which 
they were unequal. It is almost impossible to 
graft large branches upon the old stock of Shaks- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 317 

peare ; none have succeeded in their alterations of 
that poet, but such as have confined themselves to 
the lopping off a few superfluous boughs, and add- 
ing, where necessary, some small slips of their 
own, and that too with the utmost caution/' 

" The alterer has, by his management, utterly 
destroyed all pity for the principal characters of 
the play. Shad well gave Timon a mistress, who 
never forsook him in his distress ; but Mr. Cum- 
berland has raised him up a daughter, whose for- 
tune the father profusely spends on flatterers and 
sycophants ; this destroys all probability, as well 
as extinguishes commiseration. What generous 
and noble-minded man, as Shakspeare has drawn 
his Timon, would be guilty of such baseness as to 
wrong his child, by treating his visitors with the 
wealth that should be reserved for her portion? 

" It is, indeed, a miserable alteration of one of 
Shakspeare* s noblest productions. There is not, 
perhaps, in any work, ancient or modern, more 
just; reflection and admirable satire than in Timon ; 
Cumberland and his original do not, in the least, 
assimilate, for in their style they are widely dif- 
ferent ; some excellent scenes of Shakspeare are 
entirely omitted, and others grossly mutilated." 

• From these testimonies, and from the present 
oblivion of the piece, we may conclude, without 
much fear of violating truth, that had Cumberland 
duly considered his fame as a writer, he would 
have abstained from an attempt which can only 



3ft> LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

confer an humble reward, if successful, but will 
incur much contempt if unsuccessful. 

The last thing which Cumberland produced on 
the Drury-lane stage, before the secession of 
Garrick from its management, was the Note of 
Hand, or a Trip to Newmarket. This farce was 
acted with moderate applause ; and was the cause, 
it has been said, as I have already noticed, that 
Sheridan transplanted the author to his canvass, 
when he drew the character of Sir Fretful. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 319 



CHAP. XV. 

The fecundity of Cumberland 9 s muse, — Produces 
the Battle of Hastings.— Examination of 
this tragedy. — Its total deficiency in every thing 
that constitutes a tragedy. — Examples of his 
plagiarisms from Shakspeare, Pope, and 
other writers. — Instances of the pure Bathos. — 
If Sheridan laughed at it ivho could blame 
him? — Cumberland obtains promotion in his 
office. 

There was at least as much truth as gaiety in 
Cumberland's prologue to the Fashionable Lover, 
when he said of himself, 

" This bard breeds regularly once a season." 

His eagerness to produce, indeed, was greater 
than his caution to produce well ; and this eager- 
ness appears somewhat remarkable, if we believe 
his own declaration to Bickerstaff, that in com- 
mencing author he was actuated by motives purely 
" disinterested." To him who writes for bread, it 
may sometimes be forgiven, if he writes more than 
will enlarge his fame ; but there is no excuse for 
a man who sacrifices his reputation to a mere itch 
of composition which must always be relieved by 
the scratching of a pen. I have no doubt, how- 



320 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

ever, that when Cumberland composed his dra- 
mas he thought at least as much of the treasurer 
of the theatre as he did of the rumours of renown, 
or the pleasure of beholding himself in print. His 
were golden dreams ; and Fame presented herself 
to his imagination, with the lucky profits of an 
author's three nights pleasantly glittering in her 
hand. 

The next offspring of his fast-teeming muse 
was the Battle of Hastings^ a tragedy, of which 
he says but little himself, and of which little can 
be said by any one in its favour. I have heard 
that Garrick interested himself in its fate, and 
recommended it warmly to Sheridan's protection, 
but that Cumberland did not testify a just sense 
of his exertions, which greatly hurt the feelings of 
Garrick, who openly expressed his displeasure at 
such an unmerited requital. Something, however, 
is attributed, in this account, perhaps, to a wrong 
cause ; for Cumberland represents himself as having 
been unjustly treated by Garrick, who empowered 
him to engage Henderson for Drury Lane, and after- 
wards annulled the engagement upon the report of 
his brother George, who saw him perform at Bath, 
and formed a less exalted notion of his excellence. 
The acrimony which this proceeding excited, Cum- 
berland was probably not anxious to conceal ; and 
$he expression of it was attributed to a motive very 
distinct, perhaps, from what really existed. Such 
negligence is too common in the rumours of popu 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 321 

pular report, and too often engenders feuds and 
abhorrence, where kindness and respect might 
otherwise have existed. 

From whatever cause, however, it may have 
arisen, I fear there was some coolness between 
Garrick and Cumberland a short time previously 
to the death of the former, who, when he was 
asked his opinion of the Battle of Hastings, con- 
stantly evaded a distinct answer, by replying, Sir, 
what all the world says must be true ; a mode of 
replication which evidently sprung from an unwil- 
lingness to utter a falsehood, and too much kind- 
ness for the man to tell an unwelcome truth. 

In the prologue to this play, the author again 
acquaints the world with what pangs the critic's 
sneer affected him, and how he smarted from the 
attacks of newspaper writers; again he whines 
about detraction, and the hard fate it was his lot 
to endure. The audiences of those days must 
have been patient beings, for I doubt if any such 
complaints would now be tolerated. These are 
his lines of dolorous declamation : 

" Your poet thus profanely led aside, 

To range o'er tragic land without a guide, 

To pick, perhaps, with no invidious aim, 

A few cast fallings from the tree of fame. 

Damn'd, tho' untried, by the despotic rule 

Of the stern doctors in detraction's school ; 

Lash'd down each column of a public page, 

And driv'n o'er burning ploughshares to the stage ; 

Be-rhim'd and ridicul'd with doggrel wit, 

Sues out a pardon from his Pope — the Pit. 

Y 



322 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Pensive he stands in penitential weeds> 
With a huge rosary of untold beads ; 
Sentenc'd for past offences to rehearse 
Ave Apollos to the God of verse ; 
And sure there's no one but an author knows 
The penance which an author undergoes. 

To this cant, from a man who professed to write 
for pleasure only, and not for bread, a brief answer 
might have been given — abjure the path that is so 
thorny ; you entered it for amusement ; but as 
there can be no amusement in the persecution you 
so pathetically deplore, escape the one by renounc- 
ing the other. To such a reply, had it been of- 
fered, what could Cumberland have said ? 

Of the tragedy itself I have not much to say. I 
will not analyse its plot, nor examine its charac- 
ters. They are both too feeble to provoke cen- 
sure. The incidents are few and uninteresting, 
and belong neither to tragedy nor comedy ; they are 
too dull for the latter, and too trivial for the 
former. The title sufficiently expresses from what 
period of English history the action is derived; 
but he who had not read the play would scarcely 
anticipate that the battle of Hastings could be made 
the argument of a drama, and the Duke of Norman- 
dy excluded from its characters. Cumberland 
seems to have wholly forgotten what a noble plot 
might have been formed from the introduction of 
William, and the contrasted hopes and fears of his 
Norman followers with those of the English army ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 523 

or, perhaps, he saw the greatness, but felt he could 
not reach it. 

What success this play had I have not heard. 
Cumberland is silent upon the subject, and hence 
it may be inferred that it was not very eminent. 
It did not indeed deserve success ; for, besides the 
barrenness of the plot, and the imbecility of the 
characters, the sentiments and language form such 
a motley whole, as will not easily be paralleled. 
Instead of catching any of the warm and glowing 
energy of Shakspeare, Otway, or Southerne, in- 
stead of forming himself upon them, he appears 
to have borrowed only the worst features from 
the tragedies of Rowe and Phillips ; imitating 
their cold and artificial declamations, their frigid 
similes, and unnatural tumour of expression. These 
he mistook for that elevation of style, that mea- 
sured cadence of verse, and that dignity of senti- 
ment, which belong to tragedy as the representa- 
tion of great and striking events. 

Some instances of these defects shall be here 
produced, as they may, at least, amuse the reader, 
especially if he have ever found pleasure in The Art 
of Sinking, by Martinus Scriblerus. The play, in- 
deed, does not require the application of serious 
criticism; it defies it. 

When Raymond issues from the castle to receive 
his master, in the first scene, he thinks it neces- 
sary that the bugle should be sounded, but, as it 
would be unsuitable for a tragic writer to use such 

Y2 



324 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

colloquial expressions as blow or sound, he bids the 
herald "provoke the bugle," by which an un- 
learned reader might suppose it to be some- 
thing capable of anger, rather than a passive 
instrument susceptible only of noise. I have no 
objection to the metaphorical use of the word pro- 
voke, only here the occasion did not justify it, 
and its employment reminded me of the writer 
who feared to bid his servant shut the door, but 
exclaimed 

" The wooden guardian of our privacy 
Quick on its axle turn*. 

Nothing can be more distinct from dignity than 
such a turgid phraseology. " Ce'st une belle 
chose," observes Corneille, " que de faire vers 
puissans et majesteux ; cette pompe ravit d'ordi- 
naire les esprits, et pour le moins les eblouet ; 
mais il faut que les sujets en fassent naitre les 
occasions." 

Edgar returning at night to his mistress, finds 
the castle gate open. An ordinary man would 
have concluded that the porter or warder had for- 
gotten to lock it ; but a poetical lover understands 
the matter in a very different way. 

* Pope, who ridiculed this bombast, (or perhaps wrote it as a specimen 
of what should be ridiculed), has exhibited the same operation in a manner 
not less swollen : 

" The bolt obedient to the silken cord, 

To the strong staple's inmost depth restor'd, 

Secur'd the valve." Odyssey, B. I. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 325 

" O Lave ! 
Small elf, who, by the glow-worm's twinkling light, 
Fine fairy-finger'd child, can slip the bolt 
While the cramm'd warden snores, this is thy doing." 



This fanciful account is perfectly in character, it 
must be confessed ; and I suppose if the author 
had brought a house-breaker to the spot, instead of 
a lover, the gentleman finding the event equally 
convenient for his purpose, would have ascribed 
all the honour and glory of it to Mercury, who is 
the patron god of thieves as Cupid is of lovers. 

There is nothing more dangerous to a man than 
the ambition of imitating what is far beyond his 
powers of performance. When Phaeton mounted 
the chariot of his father, he perished for his pre- 
sumption. A direct endeavour to equal another 
provokes the most rigorous comparison ; and no 
one should attempt it who does not feel a confi- 
dence amounting to conviction, that he can per- 
form what he attempts. Shakspeare, in his Mid- 
summer Night's Dream, soars into one of his 
boldest flights in describing the poet, whose 

" Eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
And, as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing, 
A local habitation, and a name." 

This lofty and majestic description Cumberland 
obviously labours to imitate in the following one: 



3$6 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" The poet, by the magic of his song, 
Can charm the listening moon^ ascend the spheres, 
And in his airy and extravagant flight 
Belt wide creation's round." 

This is frigid enough ; but the conclusion ex- 
ceeds it, for the reader will hardly imagine that 
Edgar, who utters this to his mistress, does it to 
assure her, that though the poet can perform such 
feats as those described, 

" Yet can he never 
Invent that form of words to speak his passion." 

Cumberland is not a modest borrower, indeed ; 
he draws largely upon the property of others, and 
Sheridan might have justified the name he gave 
him from this play alone. For the gratification of 
the reader I will trace him through a few of his 
boldest thefts ; such as are but slightly transmuted 
in passing through his intellectual crucible. 

In Hamlet we find Laertes giving just counsel 
to his sister, and warning her how frail is virgin 
reputation, in the following lines of matchless 
beauty : 

" The chariest maid is prodigal enough. 
If she unmask her beauty to the moon : 
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes ; 
The canker galls the infants of the spring 
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed j 
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth 
Contagious blastments are most imminent. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 32? 

Ill the tragedy before us, Earl Edwin is made 
to sav, 

" The tenderest flower that withers at the breeze, 
Or, if the amorous sun but steal a kiss, 
Drops its soft head and dies, is not more frail 
Than maiden reputation ; 'tis a mirror 
Which the first sigh defiles." 

Here the imitation is rather in the idea than in 
the expression ; in the following it is in both. 
Macbeth, meditating the murder of Duncan, ob- 
serves, that 

" Pity, like a naked, new-born babe, 
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd 
Upon the sightless couriers of the air, 
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, 
That tears shall drown the wind." 

Edgar returns to the camp of Harold with great 
expedition, riding against time perhaps. Edwin 
tells him, 

" You methinks did ride, 
As you'd o'ertake the couriers of the sky, 
Hors'd on the sightless winds." 

Pope says, in his Essay on Criticism, 

" Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise." 

And Matilda says in the Battle of Hastings, 

" Praise undeserv'd, what is it but reproach ? " 

But the line would have been better had 
taken the other half of it from the same author. 



32S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Shakspeare is the chief storehouse whence Cum- 
berland drew his allusions, when he needed strik- 
ing and emphatic ones. In Richard the Third, 
the tyrant exclaims, with a savage ferocity of 
truth, 

" Crowns got by blood, must be by blood maintain'd." 

And this sort of royal logic Harold employs 
when he says, 

" Possessions by ill deeds obtain'd, by worse 
Must be upheld." 

Alliterative harmony is a favourite ornament 
with some writers, and when skilfully used, as it 
has been by Milton and Pope, it produces an 
effect not unpleasing to the ear. Cumberland 
occasionally employs it, but when, in the fourth 
act, Elwina talks of a u bloody breathless corse/ 1 
it recalls the ludicrous exemplication of this 
figure by Shakspeare : 

£& 

" Whereat with blade, with bloody, blameful blade. 
He bravely broach'd his boiling-, bloody breast." 

Had Cumberland lived when the renowned 
treatise on the Bathos was published, and had he 
written this tragedy before it was composed, how 
vast a fund for illustration it would have afforded. 
I could select numerous instances of the profound 
from its pages ; but a few shall suffice. I think 
the following may be considered as an authentic 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 329 

specimen. Edwin thus solemnly adjures Edgar 
to resume his post in the field of battle : 

" By your thrice plighted oath I do conjure you, 
By all the world calls honest, by your hopes, 
Come to the camp.'* 

Such a pompous exordium leading to such a lame 
and impotent conclusion (like the stately palaces 
of the Russian nobility, which often conduct to 
internal meanness and poverty) resembles the 
burlesque lines of Johnson : 

" Hermit hoar, in solemn cell 
Wearing out life's evening gray, 
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell 
What is bliss, and which the way ? 

Thus I spoke, and speaking sigh'd, 
Scarce repress'd the starting tear : 
When the hoary sage replied, 
Come my lad and drink some beer." 

The witty Duke of Buckingham in the Rehear- 
sal, ridiculed the unnatural use of expanded si- 
miles, when nothing but passion should be ex- 
pressed, by these lines which are a parody upon 
some that Dryden wrote in the Conquest of 
Granada : 

" So boar and sow, when any storm is nigh, 
Snuff up and smell it gath'ring in the sky : 
Boar beckons sow to trot in chesnut groves, 
And there consummate their unfinished loves ; 
Pensive in mud they wallow all alone, 
And snore and gruntle to each other's moan." 



330 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

How justly, also, might the following simile in 
this tragedy be ridiculed : a simile which Edwina 
breaks out into, when, after a struggle, she recon- 
ciles herself to the departure of her lover. Let 
him go, she exclaims, I can only die, and when I 
am gone, his fame shall be immortal : 

So when the bleak and wintry tempest rends 

The mantling ivy from the worshipp'd sides 

Of some aspiring tower, where late it hung ; 

The stately mass, as with a sullen scorn, 

From its proud height looks down upon the wreck, 

And disencumber'd from its feeble guest, 

Bares its broad bosom and defies the storm. 

Is this the language of nature ? Would any 
woman, whose heart was bursting at the dread 
thought of her lover's departure for the field of 
battle, solace herself with such frigid declamation ? 
Do we find any such coldly artificial talking, in 
the characters of Constance, Desdemona, Juliet, or 
Belvidera, when they are labouring with their 
griefs ? Produce me one such unnatural soliloquy 
in them, and I will consent that Cumberland has 
been faithful to the genuine workings of the hu- 
man heart. I will consent, also, that the following- 
rant of Edgar is the language of nature : 

By heav'n I love thee 
More than the sun burnt earth loves softening showers, 
More than new ransom'd captives love the day ; 
Or dying martyrs breathing forth their souls, 
The acclamations of whole hosts of angels. 

I will not protract this discussion by extracting 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 831 

all that occurs to me as either ludicrous, or turgid, 
or mean. Yet I will select two or three more 
instances in justification of the opinion I have 
expressed, (if it can possibly require a further one) 
and because they are such as may provoke the 
reader's smiles, if he be not a second Cassius. 

I question if the most profound inquirer into 
the works of nature, ever beheld, or heard of, a 
phenomenon like the following: 

Power supreme ! 
Whose words can bid the gathering clouds disperse, 
And chain the stubborn and contentious winds, 
When they unseat the everlasting rocks. 
And cast them to the sky. 

I am not quite certain whether Miss Edgeworth 
would not admit these lines into the next edition 
of her Irish Bulls. To unseat everlasting rocks, 
appears to me to contain an idea just as philoso- 
phically accurate as the following couplet of Pope: 

When first young Maro, in his boundless mind, 
A work to outlast immortal Rome design'd. 

Of new and appropriate metaphors, expressed 
with a happy felicity of style, the following may 
serve as a specimen : 

Once I was happy : 
Clear and serene my life's calm current ran 
While scarce a breezy wish provok'd its tide ; 
Down the smooth flood the tuneful passions fell 
In easy lapse, and slumber'd as they pass'd. 

From this it may be concluded that they 



332 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

were somnambulists, for their progressive motion 
was not hindered by sleep. 

One more instance and I have done. Matilda 
Informs her train, that on the following morning 
they must employ themselves in singing, to the 
harp, songs of victory : and this she very pointedly 
enforces by observing, that " they must teach 
their throats a loftier strain/' Now the throat is 
certainly the organ of sound, and it may be taught 
how to emit tones harmoniously; but if a meto- 
nymy can ever be advantageously employed, I 
think it might have been so here. 

I will not stop to detect other blemishes, such 
as making his characters eruditely familiar with 
classical learning, and especially the Lady Matilda. 
She talks as fluently of Jove, and Minerva, and 
Apollo, and Janus, as the author's grandfather could 
have done ; nay, I question whether Lady Jane 
Grey herself, in the plenitude of that knowledge 
which so astonished honest Roger Ascham, could 
have exhibited a more commendable proficiency. 
These acquisitions are remarkable only when we 
consider the era in which the action of the play 
is laid; and when, as far as I know, the study of 
heathen mythology or the Roman poets was not 
much cultivated in this island. A poet, to be 
sure, whose imagination is very fervid, may out- 
strip the tardy pace of time, and exhibit, as the 
customs of the eleventh century, what belongs to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 333 

the fifteenth. Shakspeare has done this, and why 
not Cumberland? 

A spirit of candour, which, though a rare qua- 
lity in a critic, is one that becomes him more 
than the most acute severity, induces me to copy 
the following lines from this tragedy, describing 
the death of Harold, and in which the reader will 
find a vigour and animation somewhat remarkable 
in a writer whose tragic style was so peculiarly 
feeble without delicacy, or turgid without strength. 
Had he written always thus, I had been spared 
the trouble of following him through his inflated 
imbecility, and the reader would have escaped the 
perusal of my pursuit. 

Matilda inquires the issue of the battle, and 
Edgar answers : 

Hearken : 
The hireling troops had fled ; one native phalanx 
Fatally brave, yet stood ; there deep engulph'd, 
Within the Norman host I found thy father, 
Mounted like Mars upon a pile of slain : 
Frowning he fought, and wore his helmet up, 
His batter'd harness at each ghastly sluice 
Streaming with blood : life gush'd at every vein, 
Yet liv'd he, as in proud despight of nature, 
His mighty soul unwilling to forsake 
Its princely dwelling : swift as thought I flew, 
And as a sturdy churl his pole-axe aim'd 
Full at the hero's crest, I sprung upon him, 
And sheath'd my rapier in the caitiff's throat. 

Matilda. Didst thou? then art thou faithful. Open Wide, 
And shower your blessings on his head, ye heavens. 

Edgar. Awhile the fainting hero we upheld ; 



334 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

(For Edwin now had join'd me) : but as well 
We might have driven the mountain cataract 
Back to its source, as stemm'd the battle's tide. 
I saw the imperial Duke, and with loud insults 
Provok'd him to the combat : but in vain ; 
The pursey braggart now secure of conquest 
Rein'd in his steed, and wing'd his squadron round 
To cut us from retreat : cold death had stopp'd 
Thy father's heart ; e'en hope itself had died : 
Midst showers of darts we bore him from the fields 
And now, supported on his soldier's pikes, 
The venerable ruin comes. 



Every thing is great or mean only by compa* 
rison ; and it is only by comparing Cumberland 
with himself that this passage can deserve ap- 
plause. Thus compared, however, it has merit ; 
and slender as it is, its value can be appreciated 
only by him whose fate it has been to read the 
traged}^ through, and to whom this parting gleam 
is like the farewell lustre of the setting sun in 
November after a dull and foggy day. I will 
now dismiss this play with two questions : if 
Sheridan laughed at it, who can blame him ? and 
if it were possible for an author to judge his 
own works dispassionately, could Cumberland 
have said of it, " that it is better written than 
planned ?" 

Shortly after the performance of this tragedy, 
his fisrt patron and master, the Earl of Halifax, 
died. Cumberland's character of him I have 
already given. He was succeeded in his office, 
as secretary for the colonial department, by Lord 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 335 

George Germain, a nobleman to whom Cumber- 
land was not at all known, and from whom he could 
hence expect few favours. He prepared himself, 
therefore, to remain contentedly in his subordinate 
office of clerk of the reports, when he suddenly 
and agreeably found, in his new principal, a 
courtesy and kindness which, as he did not expect 
it, must have been the more pleasing to him. 

" When Lord George had taken the seals/' says 
he, " I asked my friend Colonel James Cunning- 
ham to take me with him to Pall-Mali, which he 
did, and the ceremony of paying my respects was 
soon dismissed. I confess I thought my new chief 
was quite as cold in his manner as a minister need 
be, and rather more so than my intermediate friend 
had given me reason to expect. I was now living 
in great intimacy with the Duke of Dorset, and 
asked him to do me that grace with his uncle, 
which the honour of being acknowledged by him 
as his friend would naturally have obtained for me. 
This I am confident he would readily have done 
but for reasons, which precluded all desire on my 
part to say another word upon the business. I 
was therefore left to make my own way with a 
perfect stranger, whilst I was in actual negociation 
with Mr. Pownall for the secretaryship, and had 
understood Lord Clare to be friendly to our treaty 
in the very moment, when he ceased to be our 
first lord, and the power of accommodating us in 
our wishes was shifted from his hands into those 



336 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

of Lord George. I considered it, therefore, as an 
opportunity gone by, and entertained no further 
hopes of succeeding. A very short time sufficed 
to confirm the idea I had entertained of Lord 
George's character for decision and dispatch in 
business : there was at once an end to all our cir- 
cumlocutory reports and inefficient forms, that had 
only impeded business, and substituted ambiguity 
for precision : there was (as William Gerard Ha- 
milton, speaking of Lord George, truly observed 
to me) no trash in his mind ; he studied no choice 
phrases, no superfluous words, nor ever suffered 
the clearness of his conceptions to be clouded by 
the obscurity of his expressions, for these were 
the simplest and most unequivocal that could be 
made use of for explaining his opinions, or dic- 
tating his instructions. In the mean while he was 
so momentarily punctual to his time, so religiously 
observant of his engagements, that we, who served 
under him in office, felt the sweets of the ex- 
change we had so lately made in the person of 
our chief. 

" I had now no other prospect but that of 
serving in my subordinate situation under an easy 
master with security and comfort, for as I was not 
flattered with the show of any notices from him, 
but such as I might reasonably expect, I built no 
hopes upon his favour,*nor allowed myself to think 
I was in any train of succeeding in my treaty with 
our secretary for his office ; and as I had reason to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. S3? 

believe he was equally happy with myself in serving 
under such a principal, I took for granted he would 
move no further in the business. 

" One day, as Lord George was leaving the office, 
he stopt me on the outside of the door, at the 
head of the stairs, and invited me to pass some 
days with him and his family at Stoneland near 
Tunbridge Wells. It was on my part so unex- 
pected, that I doubted if I had rightly understood 
him, as he had spoken in a low and submitted 
voice, as his manner was, and I consulted his con- 
fidential secretary, Mr. Doyley, whether he would 
advise me to the journey. He told me that he 
knew the house was filled from top to bottom with 
a large party, that he was sure there would be no 
room for me, and dissuaded me from the under- 
taking. I did not quite follow his advice by neg- 
lecting to present myself, but I resolved to secure 
my retreat to Tunbridge Wells, and kept my chaise 
in waiting to make good my quarters. When I 
arrived at Stoneland I was met at the door by 
Lord George, who soon discovered the precaution 
I had taken, and himself conducting me to my 
bed-chamber, told me it had been reserved for me, 
and ever after would be set apart as mine, where 
he hoped I would consent to find myself at home. 
This was the man I had esteemed so cold, and 
thus was I at once introduced to the commence- 
ment of a friendship, which day by day improved, 

Z 



338 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

and which no one word or action of his life to 
come ever for an instant interrupted or dimi- 
nished. 

" Shortly after this, it came to his knowledge 

that there had been a treaty between Mr. Pownall 

mi 

and me for his resignation of the place of secretary, 
and he asked me what had passed ; I told him how 
it stood, and what the conditions were, that my 
superior in office expected for the accommodation. 
I had not yet mentioned this to him, and probably 
never should. He said he would take it into his 
own hands, and in a few days signified the king's 
pleasure that Mr. Pownall' s resignation was ac- 
cepted, and that I should succeed him as secretaiy 
in clear and full enjoyment of the place, without 
any compensation whatsoever. Thus was I, be- 
yond all hope and without a word said to me, that 
could lead me to expect a favour of that sort, pro- 
moted by surprise to a very advantageous and de- 
sirable situation. I came to my office at the hour 
appointed, not dreaming of such an event, and took 
my seat at the adjoining table, when, Mr. Pownall 
being called out of the room, Lord George turned 
round to me and bade me take his chair at the 
bottom of the table, announcing to the Board his 
majesty's commands, as above recited, with a po- 
sitive prohibition of all stipulations. AYhen I had 
endeavoured to express myself as properly on the 
occasion as my agitated state of spirits would allow 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 339 

of, I remember Lord George made answer, c That 
if I was as well pleased upon receiving his ma- 
jesty's commands, as he was in being the bearer of 
them, I was indeed very happy/ — If I served him 
truly, honestly, and ardently ever after, till I fol- 
lowed him to the grave, where is my merit ? How 
could I do otherwise ?" 



Z 2 



340 IXFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. XVI. 

Cumberland produces the opera of Calypso. — 
And afterwards the Widow of Delphi. — 
Exerts himself in behalf of the unfortunate 
Perreau. — Solicited to do the same for Dr. 
Dodd, but declines when he hears that Johnson 
undertook his cause. — Anecdotes of Lord Rod- 
ney. — A maxim of that gallant Admiral* s. — 
Lines addressed to Lord Mansfield, by 
Cumberland, in reference to a transaction of 
Rodney's. 

In 1779 Cumberland produced the opera of 
Calypso, of which the dedication, to the Duchess 
of Manchester, is elegantly encomiastic. The 
opera itself requires little notice. Telemachus and 
Mentor singing songs is something too much ; it is 
as bad as Garrrick's alteration of Shakspeare's Tem- 
pest, in which all the characters were degraded to 
the mummery of musical recitative. The images, 
in this piece, are sufficiently classical, and the 
poetry is a little above the ordinary level of such 
compositions : but, like the Battle of Hastings, it is 
compounded of shreds and patches, stolen from all 
sources. These thefts, however, I do not mean to 
detect, as I have those in the tragedy : it is 
enough to allude to them : the fact will require no 
voucher. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 341 

The music to this opera was composed by Mr. 
Butler, and Cumberland speaks of it with high 
encomiums: but it was never published. Butler 
also composed the airs for another opera which 
Cumberland produced the ensuing season, entitled, 
The Widow of Delphi^, or the Descent of the Deities, 
of which, had the author printed it, I question if 
it would be necessary to say any more than thus 
to record the period of its performance. They 
both experienced a very brief existence ; nor can 
I think that it would be advantageous to the ma- 
nagers, or agreeable to the public, as the author 
insinuates, that Calypso should be revived, eminent 
as the vocal performers on the stage now are. 

Of the Widow of Delphi Cumberland says, 
" that having had it many years in his hands, by 
the frequent revisions and corrections which he 
has had opportunities of giving to the manuscript, 
he is encouraged to believe that if he, or any after 
him, shall send it into the world, that drama will 
be considered as one of his most classical and 
creditable productions. " With what propriety 
this opinion is expressed, I am necessarily unable 
to say ; but from the instances which I have 
already had of Cumberland's mode of estimating 
his own productions, I am apprehensive that the 
publication of this opera would not corroborate the 
author's notions of its excellence. 

About this period he engaged in a cause ho- 
nourable to his benevolence. The defence which 



342 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

was read at the bar by the unfortunate Perreau 
was drawn up by Cumberland, and though it failed 
to preserve his life, the kindness with which he 
exerted himself in his behalf deserves equally 
to be commended. Garrick, who was present when 
this defence was read, spoke with enthusiasm of 
its excellence in the company of Cumberland, not 
knowing him to be the writer: the applause of 
such a man was motive enough for an author's 
vanity to disclose the secret, but Cumberland was 
silent, and Garrick, who confidently, though, as 
the event proved, untruly predicted that it had 
saved the prisoner's life, discovered afterwards that 
he had unconsciously extolled its superiority in 
the presence of the author. 

The impression which this performance had ex- 
cited was probably the reason why, at a subse- 
quent period, Cumberland was solicited by Dr. 
Dodd, to undertake his defence in a similar man- 
ner: but when he heard that so potent an advo- 
cate as Dr. Johnson was preparing to step forth in 
his cause, he prudently retired from the field, 
" convinced/' says he, " that if the powers of 
Johnson could not move mercy to reach his la- 
mentable case, there was no further hope in man." 

During the time that he acted in subordination 
to Lord George Germain, he was distinguished by 
that nobleman with peculiar marks of his favour 
and approbation. He was frequently at his table, 
and met there, of course, many of the most eminent 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 343 

political characters of the time. Among those 
who partook of his lordship's hospitality was the 
gallant Rodney, with whom Cumberland was al- 
ready intimate, and to whom he had an opportunity, 
through the interest of his patron, of doing some 
essential services. The few anecdotes which he 
has preserved of this distinguished naval com- 
mander, are highly interesting and characteristic. 

" I had known Sir George Brydges Rodney in 
early life, and whilst he was residing in France, 
pending the uneasy state of his affairs at home, 
had spared no pains to serve his interest and pave 
the way for his return to his own country, where 
I was not without hopes, by the recommendation 
of Lord George Germain, to procure him an em- 
ployment worthy of his talents and high station in 
the navy. I drew up from his minutes a memorial 
of his services, and petitioned for employ: he came 
home at the risque of his liberty to refute some 
malicious imputations, that had been glanced at 
his character : this he effectually and honourably 
accomplished, and I was furnished with testimo- 
nials very creditable to him as an officer; his si- 
tuation in the mean while was very uncomfortable 
and his exertions circumscribed, yet in this pressure 
of his affairs, to mark his readiness and zeal for 
service, he addressed a letter to the king, tendering 
himself to serve as a volunteer under an admiral, 
then going out, who if I do not mistake, was his 
junior on the list. In this forlorn, unfriended 



344 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

state, with nothing but exclusion and despair 
before his eyes, when not a ray of hope beamed 
upon him from the admiralty, and he dared not set 
a foot beyond the limits of his privilege, I had 
the happy fortune to put in train that state- 
ment of his claim for service and employ, which, 
through the immediate application of Lord George, 
taking all the responsibility on himself, obtained for 
that adventurous and gallant admiral the command 
of that squadron, which on its passage to the West 
Indies made capture of the Spanish fleet fitted out 
for the Caraccas. The degree of gratification, 
which I then experienced, is not easily to be de- 
scribed. It was not only that of a triumph gained, 
but of a terror dismissed, for the West India mer- 
chants had been alarmed, and clamoured against 
the appointment, so generally and so decidedly, 
as to occasion no small uneasiness to my friend 
and patron, and drew from him something that 
resembled a remonstrance for the risque I had ex- 
posed him to. But in the brilliancy of this exploit 
all was done away, and past alarms were only 
recollected to contrast the joy which this success 
diffused. 

" It happened to me to be present, and sitting 
next to Admiral Rodney at table, when the thought 
seemed first to occur to him of breaking the French 
line by passing through it in the heat of the action. 
It was at Lord George Germain's house, at Stone- 
land, after dinner, when having asked a number of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 345 

questions about the manoeuvring of columns, and 
the effect of charging with them on a line of in- 
fantry, he proceeded to arrange a parcel of cherry 
stones, which he had collected from the table, and 
forming them as two fleets drawn up in line and 
opposed to each other, he at once arrested our at- 
tention, which had not been very generally engaged 
by his preparatory enquiries, by declaring he was 
determined so to pierce the enemy's line of battle, 
(arranging his manoeuvre at the same time on the 
table) if ever it was his fortune to bring them into 
action. I dare say this passed with some as mere 
rhapsody, and all seemed to regard it as a very 
perilous and doubtful experiment, but landsmen's 
doubts and difficulties made no impression on the 
admiral, who having seized the idea held it fast, 
and in his eager animated way went on ma- 
noeuvring his cherry stones, and throwing his ene- 
my's representatives into such utter confusion, 
that already possessed of that victory in imagina- 
tion, which in reality he lived to gain, he concluded 
his process by swearing he would lay the French 
admiral's flag at his sovereign's feet ; a promise 
which he actually pledged to his majesty in his 
closet, and faithfully and gloriously performed. 

" He was a singular and extraordinary mant 
there were some prominent and striking eccen- 
tricities about him, which, on a first acquaintance, 
might dismiss a cursory observer with inadequate 
and false impressions of his real character ; for he 



346 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

would very commonly indulge himself in a loose 
and heedless style of talking, which for a time 
might intercept and screen from observation the 
sound good sense that he possessed, and the 
strength and dignity of mind, that were natural to 
him. Neither ought it to be forgotten that the sea 
was his element^ and it was there, and not on land, 
that the standard ought to be planted by which his 
merits should be measured. We are apt to set 
that man down as vain-glorious and unwise, who 
fights battles over the table, and in the ardour of 
his conversation, though amongst enviers and ene- 
mies, keeps no watch upon his words, confiding in 
their candour and believing them his friends. Such 
a man was Admiral Lord Rodney, whom history 
will record amongst the foremost of our naval 
heroes, and whoever doubts his courage might as 
well dispute against the light of the sun at noon- 
day. 

" That he carried this projected manoeuvre into 
operation, and that the effect of it was successfully 
decisive all the world knows. My friend, Sir 
Charles Douglas, captain of the fleet, confessed to 
me that he himself had been adverse to the ex- 
periment, and in discussing it with the admiral had 
stated his objections ; to these he got no other 
answer but that ' his counsel was not called for; 
he required obedience only, he did not want 
advice/ Sir Charles also told me that whilst the 
project was in operation, (the battle then raging) 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 347 

his own attention being occupied by the gallant 
defence made by the French Glorieux against the 
ships that were pouring their fire into her, upon 
his crying out — ' Behold, Sir George, the Greeks 
and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus]' 
The admiral, then pacing the quarter deck in great 
agitation, pending the experiment of his ma- 
noeuvre, (which in the instance of one ship had 
unavoidably miscarried) peevishly exclaimed, — 
6 Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans; I have 
other things to think of/ — When in a few minutes 
after, his supporting ship having led through the 
French line in a gallant style, turning with a smile 
of joy to Sir George Douglas, he cried out, — c Now, 
my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks 
and Trojans, and the whole of Homer's Iliad, or as 
much of it as you please, for the enemy is in con- 
fusion, and our victory is secure/ This anecdote, 
correctly as I relate it, I had from that gallant 
officer, untimely lost to his country, whose can- 
dour scorned to rob his admiral of one leaf of his 
laurels, and who, disclaiming all share in the ma- 
noeuvre, nay confessing he had objected to it, did, 
in the most pointed and decided terms, again and 
again repeat his honourable attestations of the 
courage and conduct of his commanding officer on 
that memorable day/' 

It was a maxim with this great man never to 
embarrass the strict line of his duty by any political 
considerations of what parties prevailed, or what 



348 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

were dismissed; a maxim which might be ad- 
vantageously adopted by some men now in the 
service, who confound the duties of their station 
by mixing in all the petty intrigues of faction. 
" Our naval officers/' said Rodney, " have nothing 
to do with parties and politics, being simply bound 
to carry their instructions into execution, to the 
best of their abilities, without deliberating about 
men and measures, which forms no part of their 
duty, and for which they are in no degree re- 
sponsible." These are the arguments of a superior 
mind which clearly conceives its object, and ac- 
complishes it by open, manly, and direct means. 

With Lord Mansfield, Cumberland was familiarly 
intimate, and to him he addressed the following- 
pleasing lines, in allusion to his recal on a change 
of ministers : — 

To the Earl of Mansfield. 
Shall merit find no shelter but the grave, 
And envy still pursue the wise and brave ? 
Sticks the leech close to life, and only drops 
When its food fails and the heart's current stops ? 
Though sculptur'd laurels grace the hero's bust, 
And tears are mingled with the poet's dust, 
Review their sad memorials, you will find 
This fell by faction, that in misery pin'd. 

When France and Spain the subject ocean swept, 
Whilst Briton's tame inglorious lion slept, 
Or lashing up his courage now and then, 
Turn'd out and growl'd, and then turn'd in again, 
Rodney in that ill-omen'd hour arose, 
Crush'd his own first and next his country's foes; 
Though all that fate allovv'd was nobly won, 
Envy could squint at something still undone ; 



llFE OF CUMBERLAND. 349 

Injurious faction stript him of command, 

And snatch'd the helm from his victorious hand, 

Summon'd the nation's brave defender home, 

Prejudg'd his cause and warn'd him to his doom ; 

Whilst hydra-headed malice open'd wide 

Her thousand mouths, and bay'd him till he died. 

The poet's cause comes next — and you my Lord, 
The Muse's friend, will take a poet's word ; 
Trust me our province is replete with pain ; 
They say we're irritable, envious, vain : 
They say — and Time has varnish'd o'er the lie 
Till it assumes Truth's venerable dye — 
That wits, like falcons soaring for their prey, 
Pounce every wing that flutters in their way, 
Plunder each rival songster's tuneful breast 
To deck with others plumes their own dear nest j 
They say — but 'tis an office I disclaim 
To brush their cobwebs from the roll of fame, 
There let the spider hang and work his worst, 
And spin his flimsy venom till he burst ; 
Reptiles beneath the holiest shrine may dwell, 
And toads engender in the purest well. 

Genius must pay its tax like other wares 
According to the value which it bears ; 
On sterling worth detraction's stamp is laid, 
As gold before 'tis current is assay'd. 
Fame is a debt time present never pays, 
But leaves it on the score to future days ; 
And why is restitution thus deferr'd 
Of long arrears from year to year incurr'd ? 
Why to posterity this labour given 
To search out frauds and set defaulters even ? 
If our sons hear our praise 'tis well, and yet 
Praise in the father's ear had sounded sweet. 

Still there is one exception we must own, 
Whom all conspire to praise, and one alone ; 
One on whose living brow we plant the wreath, 
And almost deify on this side death : 
He in the plaudits of the present age 
Already reads his own historic page, 



530 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

And, though preeminence is under heav'n 
The last of crimes by man to be forgiv'n, 
Justice her own vice-gerent will defend, 
The orphan's father and the widow's friend ; 
Truth, virtue, genius mingle beams so bright, 
Envy is dazzl'd with excess of light ; 
Detraction's tongue scarce stammers out a fault, 
And faction blushes for its own assault. 
His the happy gift, the nameles grace, 
That shapes and fits the man to every place^ 
The gay companion at the social board, 
The guide of councils, or the senate's lord, 
Now regulates the law's discordant strife, 
Now balances the scale of death or life, 
Sees guilt engendering in the human heart, 
And strips from falsehood's face the mask of art. 
Whether, assembled with the wise and great, 
He stands the pride and pillar of the state, 
With well-weigh'.d argument distinct and clear 
Confirms the judgment and delights the ear, 
Or in the festive circle deigns to sit 
Attempering wisdom with the charms of wit- 
Blest talent, form'd to profit and to please, 
To clothe Instruction in the garb of Ease, 
Sublime to rise, or graceful to descend, 
Now save an empire and now cheer a friend. 

More I could add, but you perhaps complain, 
And call it mere creation of the brain ; 
Poets you say will flatter — true, they will ; 
But I nor inclination have nor skill — 
Where is your model, you will ask me, where ? 
Search your own breast, my Lord, you'll find it there. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 351 

CHAP. XVII. 
Cumberland departs upon his Spanish Mission. — 
A brief recapitulation of that affair. — Its impor- 
tance now necessarily weakened. — Exalts a gale 
into a storm. — Fails in his undertaking. — Igno- 
rance of an ecclesiastic. — Cumberland vain of the 
notice he received from the royal family of Spain. 
— The society he kept at Madrid. — Account of 
Tiranna, the celebrated actress. — Cumberland 
recalled. — Lord Hillsborough's Letter. — 
Reflections upon Cumberland's account of this 
business. — Insincerity of the English government 
towards him. — Refuses an indemnification from 
the King of Spain. — The whole transaction in- 
volved in mystery. — The dangers of a pinch of 
snuff in Spain. 

The progress of my narrative has now brought 
me to the most remarkable period of Cumberland's 
life, that when he accepted the mission to Spain 
which, in its consequences, so little benefited his 
condition. His account of this business is written 
with every appearance of truth ; his sincerity, in- 
deed, had little to fear from temptation at that pe- 
riod of his existence when he sat down to compose 
his Memoirs: and he removed every ground of 
suspicion by a minute reference to dates and per- 
sons, by which any falsehood might easily have been 
detected. He firmly maintains his right to be cre- 
dited, by the solemn disavowal which he makes of 
every intention to deceive ; and as his relation 



352 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

has remained uncontradicted either by public or 
private testimony, that right must be willingly 
acknowledged. 

It appears, that in the year 1780, he possessed 
some means of secretly knowing the intrigues 
which were carrying on between the courts of 
France and Spain, through their confidential agents 
in this country, who were in correspondence with 
its avowed enemies. How he acquired this 
knowledge he does not communicate ; but I am 
willing to hope it was without any dishonourable 
practices. When it was obtained, however, he 
thought it his duty to impart it to the govern- 
ment, and the result was that a secret negociation 
might probably be opened with the minister Flo- 
rida Blanca. With this negociation Cumberland 
was intrusted, and he soon departed for Lisbon, 
with his wife and family. Here he was to remain 
till he ascertained the propriety of going forward 
to his ultimate destination, or the necessity of 
returning without accomplishing his errand. He 
was to be governed in either of these determina- 
tions by the nature of the advices which he should 
receive from the Abbe Hussey, chaplain to his 
Catholic Majesty, who was to proceed to Aran- 
juez, and to communicate with Cumberland upon 
the posture of affairs. 

He took his family with him, that his real ob- 
ject might be the better concealed, and that while 
ostensibly travelling into Italy upon a passport 
through the Spanish dominions, he might, in 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 353 

effect, fulfil the object of his journey, whatever it 
was. 

Having received his necessary papers and in- 
structions from the Earl of Hillsborough, on the 
17th of April, 1780, he repaired to Portsmouth, 
where a frigate was prepared for conveying him to 
Lisbon ; and on the 28th he set sail. His ad- 
ventures on the passage he has related with 
an ostentatious display of nautical terms, and 
magnified some ordinary occurrences into a tale of 
terror, very pardonable in a man whose nerves were 
weak, and whose acquaintance with maritime 
affairs had hitherto been confined to crossing and 
recrossing the Irish sea, 

I shall not follow him, however, either through 
his technical phraseology, or his romantic relation 
of a brisk gale, which swells into an awful storm, in 
his description, but inform the reader that he ar- 
rived very safe at Lisbon on the 16th of May, hav- 
ing, indeed, had an action with a French frigate, 
which was captured, and the operations of which 
must have been sufficiently impressive to one unfa- 
miliar with them. His account of this matter, how- 
ever, is very meagre, as if all his powers had been 
exhausted upon the storm ; but he wrote a song of 
triumph on the occasion, which was often sung in 
full chorus by the crew after they arrived at Lis- 
bon. I shall omit it here ; for it has nothing to 
recommend it but sea terms, and a style perfectly 
suitable to those for whom it was intended. 

2 A 



354 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

The Abbe Hussey immediately departed for 
Aranjuez, and soon wrote to Cumberland advis- 
ing him to proceed on his journey into Spain, to 
give the negotiation a trials but he did not express 
himself with much confidence as to its success. 
How to act, upon such slender motives for pro- 
ceeding, was what Cumberland could not immedi- 
ately resolve ; but he finally adopted the advice of 
Mr, Hussey, and prepared for entering Spain. 
He communicated his intention to Lord Hillsbo- 
rough, in a letter, of which it may be said, as of 
all the despatches preserved in the Memoirs, that 
it was more the laboured and involved production 
of a literary man, than the simple, brief, and ex- 
plicit statement of one possessed with the distinct 
conceptions of business. It is too verbose, and 
while it wanders into nice distinctions upon the 
motives of human action, it tells too little of what 
the minister would most wish to know. 

Cumberland set forth, however, and soon experi- 
enced the miseries of travelling in Portugal and 
Spain. Had Shenstone been of either country he 
never would have written his well known lines on 
the comforts and luxuries of an inn, and, least of 
all, would he have told the melancholy truth which 
the following stanza contains : 

Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, 
Where'er his stages may have been, 
May sigh to think he stil has found 
The warmest welcome at an inn- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 355 

The wretched accommodations of the posadas is 
well known to all who have read the accounts of 
any travellers into these countries, and Cumber- 
land seems to have suffered them, at least, with 
as little patience as any man could do. The details 
of his journey I shall not recapitulate, but I may 
observe, that they possess at present, brief as they 
are, an accidental value from the deplorable condi- 
tion in which both those nations are now placed 
by the abhorred ambition of the most detested 
scourge that ever cursed mankind. There are few 
of the places mentioned by Cumberland in his pro- 
gress from Lisbon to Aranjuez, whose names have 
not been recently familiarised to us by the exploits 
of our gallant countrymen, of whom itmay be con- 
fidently predicted, that whatever issue it may 
please the great Disposer of all events to grant to 
our endeavours, the memory of their deeds will be 
revered in after ages with the same enthusiasm that 
we now mention the plain of Marathon or the field 
of Cressy. The illustrious hero, too, who guides 
our armies, and who has hitherto exhibited a 
combination of skill in projecting his measures, of 
prudence in conducting them, and of promptitude in 
the moment of action or of danger, unsurpassed in 
the annals of our own country, and probably of 
any other, will be delivered down to posterity in 
the fair catalogue of those whose greatness was 
achieved in the path of duty and true glory. 

Shortly after Cumberland's arrival at Aranjuez, 
2 A 2 



356 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

he was admitted to an interview with the minister 
Count Florida Blanca, and if we may judge of the 
character of his mission, from the mysterious pre- 
cautions with which he was received, it must 
have been one of singular peril. He always vi- 
sited this minister by night, and was ushered in 
by his confidential domestic, through a suite of 
five rooms, the doors of each being immediately 
locked when he had passed through. Thus impe- 
netrably closetted,hecommencecl his operations, and 
with such auspicious beginning that he considered 
them prosperously advancing to a successful con- 
clusion, when the riots, which disturbed London 
in the year 1780, being known at Madrid, (for an 
account of them was regularly transmitted to the 
Spanish court by their ambassador at Paris, Count 
d'Aranda) interposed an obstruction at so critical 
a juncture, that it was never afterwards possible to 
bring the matter to a similar point of propitious 
maturity. The tumults of the British metropolis 
were magnified into an actual rebellion, and it was 
thought impolitic at Madrid to enter into any ner 
gociation with the agents of a government whose 
overthrow was hourly expected, and was, perhaps, 
hourly desired. Cumberland did all he could to 
counteract the unlucky effect of this intelligence, 
by assuring the ministers that these dissentions 
would soon be quieted, and that there was no 
danger to be apprehended in regard to the stability 
of the government. His predictions had the fate 
of Cassandra's. They were addressed to men who 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 35J 

were either weak enough to believe what was so 
improbable, or crafty enough to assume that belief 
as a pretext for delaying a business they were in 
no hurry to complete, 

Cumberland had not the good fortune to please 
his employers, and he enters into a laboured vin- 
dication of himself, in the second volume of his 
Memoirs. No question can be justly understood 
if the testimonies on only one side be given ; but, 
admitting that what Cumberland states is strictly 
true, I think there can be no doubt that he was 
censured by Lord Hillsborough, without sufficient 
cause. He seems to have acted with caution, 
when caution was required, and with vigor and 
promptitude when delay or timidity would have 
probably precipitated the ruin of his schemes. 
To excite the captious displeasure of a minister, 
however, has been the fate of abler negociators 
than Cumberland. 

No interest can possibly attach, at this moment, 
to the detail of what Cumberland did, or what he 
did not do, in the capacity which he filled at the 
court of Madrid. To himself the recollection of 
that period must always have had an importance 
which it would necessarily lose in the eyes of 
others; nor do I blame him that he dwelled so 
copiously upon the transaction ; it was the most 
memorable epoch of his life, and in him it was 
venial to be diffuse. The reader, however, is wea- 
ried before he gets through the pages that contain 



35§ LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

his despatches to Lord Hillsborough, his confer- 
ences with Florida Blanca, his arrangements with 
Mr. Hussey, and his explanations of what should 
have been done at home, and what omitted. The 
time is gone by ; the occasion that called him 
forth is forgotten ; and neither hope nor fear 
is now excited by the prospects of his success 
or failure. 

It will be prudent in me, therefore, not to encum- 
ber my pages with a recapitulation of what exhi- 
bits little else but tediousness in those of Cum- 
berland ; and it will suffice to add, that in Febru- 
ary, 1781, his recall was signified to him by Lord 
Hillsborough, to which intimation he paid due 
obedience, and, travelling through Spain and 
France, in a state of great bodily debility from ill- 
ness, reached England after an absence of about 
twelve months, during which nothing had been 
successfully accomplished. 

But while I thus briefly dismiss the political 
details of his Spanish journey, I propose to dwell 
somewhat longer upon other topics connected 
with it, both as they concern Cumberland himself, 
and as they may be amusing or interesting to the 
reader. Wholly to omit these would be as culpa- 
ble as in a biographer of Milton to relate only that 
he went to Italy and back again, without telling 
what befel him personally during his absence. 

It betokens a lamentable state of society when 
the public teachers of religion have nothing but 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 359 

bigotted zeal for their qualification, without that 
learning which discovers the path of truth, and 
that persuasion which leads man into it. When 
Cumberland visited the Escurial, the prior accom- 
panied him in his examinations of whatever was 
curious and worthy of notice. Among other 
things he inquired about a manuscript, which was 
said to be some original letters of Brutus, written in 
Greek. These letters both Dr. Bentley and Sir 
John Dalrymple had mentioned, and Cumberland 
found them, upon examination, manifestly spuri- 
ous. The prior thought so too ; but the reasons 
of his belief were sufficiently curious. They 
could not be the true letters of Brutus he said, be- 
cause they professed to be written after the death 
of Julius Caesar, but it was well known that Bru- 
tus died before Julius Caesar. Cumberland po- 
litely endeavoured to rectify this anachronism by 
hinting that it was generally believed Brutus was 
one of those conspirators who effected the assassi- 
nation of Caesar. The prior allowed that such a 
rumour was rather prevalent, but he hastened into 
his cell, and produced a large folio volume of 
chronology, where that idea was fully proved to 
be erroneous. With such an antagonist Cumber- 
land forebore to contend ; but what a picture does 
it exhibit of the keeper of a royal library, and a 
professor of the learned languages ! 

What little he has said of the Escurial may be 
passed over in silence. We know enough of this 



360 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

singular building from other travellers, who either 
examined it more leisurely, or had more inclina- 
tion to describe it. 

He seems to dwell with peculiar complacency 
upon every mark of attention which he received 
from the royal family during his residence in Spain. 
They distinguished him, indeed, in a manner suf- 
ficiently flattering to his feelings, whether it arose 
from any personal regard for him, from any considera- 
tion of his country, or from an urbanity of conduct, 
natural to those illustrious personages. The king 
permitted him to select two of the finest chargers 
from his stud, as a present to his own sovereign, and 
the Prince of Asturias condescended to change 
the arrangements of a room which had been fur- 
nished in the Chinese style, in compliance with 
his observations. These marks of consideration 
were sufficient to gratify vanity, and Cumberland 
tells of them with a minuteness which shews that 
his vanity was gratified. They were not, indeed, 
all which he received ; but the reader can dispense 
with an ampler detail ; they were no less gracious 
in the donors than pleasing to the receiver. We 
are told, indeed, that the queen took the pattern of 
his daughter's riding-habits, and that she " put 
broad gold lace round the bottom of the skirt," 
and that " she sent for several other articles of 
their dress as samples/' 

Of the society which he either found or made 
in Madrid, he does not say much. He gives an 



LtFE OF CUMBERLAND. 36 1 

account how one day was passed, and he repre- 
sents that as an accurate specimen of all the rest. 
It was an interchange of ceremonies, I imagine, 
rather than of friendship or of conversation. 

He relates a pleasing anecdote of Count Kau- 
nitz (son of the imperial minister)^ who was am- 
bassador to the court of Spain at the same time 
that Cumberland was upon his mission there. 
When Cumberland was at the Spanish theatre one 
night, shortly after his arrival at Madrid, witness- 
ing the exhibition of a comedy that " seemed to 
be grounded upon the story of Richardson's Pa- 
mela," this nobleman entered the same box, and 
placed himself at the back seat. There happened 
to be, in the play, a character which was meant to 
personate a British naval officer. When he made 
his appearance on the stage, it was with so little 
resemblance of the original either in dress or man- 
ner, that Cumberland could not but smile at the 
awkward imitation, which Count Kaunitz perceiv- 
ing, leaned forwards and addressed him in the fol- 
lowing elegant and courteous manner : " I hope, 
Sir, you will overlook a small mistake in point of 
costume, which this gentleman has very naturally 
fallen into, as I am convinced he would have been 
proud of presenting himself to you in his proper 
uniform, could he have found among all his naval 
acquaintance any one who could have furnished 
him with a sample of it/' This ingenious remark 
led to a conversation that terminated in an inti- 



362 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

macybetweentheCountandCumberland, which was 
uninterrupted but by the departure of the latter. 

Among those who used to frequent his evening 
circle at home Cumberland enumerates, besides 
Count Kaunitz, (who subsequently formed an 
attachment to his eldest daughter, but died, soon 
after, at Barcelona), Signior Giusti, an Italian, se- 
cretary of the embassy ; General Count Pallavi- 
cini, the Nuncio Colonna, cardinal elect, the Ve- 
netian Ambassador, those of Saxony and Denmark, 
Colonel O'Moore of the Walloons, Signior Nicho- 
las Marchetti, and some of the heads of religious 
fraternities. 

In this society he represents himself as passing 
his time with tolerable ease and gratification ; and 
he was inclined to estimate it the more highly, 
perhaps, because he could not weaken the plea- 
sures which it afforded, by any that could be 
obtained by external search. Amusements were 
few in Madrid, and those few not much suited to 
a foreign taste. The theatre, which is a common 
centre of attraction in every country, w T as here 
reduced to a state of meanness which could only ex- 
cite contempt. It was " small, dark, ill-furnished, 
and ill attended. " Yet, it had one attraction, and 
that one powerful beyond what any other theatre 
in Europe possessed. This was the performances 
of the celebrated Tiranna, as she was called, a won- 
derful tragic actress, of whom Cumberland gives 
the following interesting account : 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 363 

" That extraordinary woman, whose real name 
I do not remember, and whose real origin cannot 
be traced, till it is settled from what particular 
nation or people we are to derive the outcast race 
of gypsies, was not less formed to strike beholders 
with the beauty and commandingmajesty of her per- 
son, than to astonish all that heard her, by the powers 
that nature and art had combined to give her. My 
friend Count Pietra Santa, who had honourable 
access to this great stage-heroine, intimated to her 
the very high expectation I had formed of her per- 
formances, and the eager desire I had to see her 
in one of her capital characters, telling her at the 
same time that I had been a writer for the stage in 
my own country ; in consequence of this intima- 
tion she sent me word that I should have notice 
from her when she wished me to come to the the- 
atre, till when she desired I would not present 
myself in my box upon any night, though her 
name might be in the bill, for it was only when 
she liked her part, and was in the humour to play 
well, that she wished me to be present. 

" In obedience to her message I waited several 
days, and at last received the looked-for summons; 
I had not been many minutes in the theatre before 
she sent a mandate to me to go home, for that she 
was in no disposition that evening for playing 
well, and should neither do justice to her own 
talents, nor to my expectations. I instantly 
obeyed this whimsical injunction, knowing it to 



364 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

be so perfectly in character with the capricious 
humour of her tribe* When something more than 
a week had passed, I was again invited to the the- 
atre, and permitted to sit out the whole represen- 
tation* I had not then enough of the language to 
understand much more than the incidents and ac- 
tion of the play, which was of the deepest cast of 
tragedy, for in the course of the plot she murdered 
her infant children, and exhibited them dead on the 
stage, lying on each side of her, whilst she, sitting 
on the bare floor between them, (her attitude, ac- 
tion, features, tones, defying all description), pre- 
sented such a high-wrought picture of hysteric 
phrensy, laughing wild amidst severest woe, as 
placed her in my judgment at the very summit of 
her art; in fact I have no conception that the 
powers of acting can be carried higher ; and such 
was the effect upon the audience, that whilst the 
spectators in the pit, having caught a kind of sym- 
pathetic phrensy from the scene, were rising up in 
a tumultuous manner, the word was given out by 
authority for letting fall the curtain, and a catas- 
trophe, probably too strong for exhibition, was not 
allowed to be completed. 

■ " A few minutes had passed, when this wonderful 
creature, led in by Pietra Santa, entered my box ; 
the artificial paleness of her cheeks, her eyes, 
which she had dyed of a bright vermillion round 
the edges of the lids, her fine arms bare to the 
shoulders, the wild magnificence of her attire, and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 365 

the profusion of her dishevelled locks, glossy black 
as the plumage of the raven, gave her the appear- 
ance of something so more than human, such a Sybil, 
such an imaginary being, so awful, so impressive, 
that my blood chilled as she approached me, not to 
ask but to claim my applause, demanding of me if I 
had ever seen any actress that could be compared 
with her in my own, or any other, country. ' I 
was determined,' she said, ; to exert myself for 
you this night; and if the sensibility of the audi- 
ence would have suffered me to have concluded 
the scene, I should have convinced you that I do 
not boast of my own performances without rea- 
son/ 

" The allowances, which the Spanish theatre 
could afford to make to its performers, were so 
very moderate, that I should doubt if the whole 
year's salary of the Tiranna would have more than 
paid for the magnificent dress, in which she then 
appeared ; but this and all othercharges appertaining 
to her establishment were defrayed from the coffers 
of the Duke of Osuna, a grandee of the first class, 
and commander of the Spanish guards. This no- 
ble person found it indispensably necessary for his 
honour, to have the finest woman in Spain upon 
his pension, but by no means necessary to be ac- 
quainted with her, and at the very time, of which 
I am now speaking, Pietra Santa seriously assured 
me, that his excellency had indeed paid large sums 
to her order, but had never once visited, or even 



366 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

seen her. He told me, at the same time, that he 
had very lately taken upon himself to remonstrate 
upon this want of curiosity, and having suggested 
to his excellency how possible it was for him to 
order his equipage to the door, and permit him to 
introduce him to this fair creature, whom he knew 
only by report, and the bills she had drawn upon 
his treasurer, the duke graciously consented to 
my friend's proposal, and actually set out with 
him for the gallant purpose of taking a cup of cho- 
colate with his hitherto invisible mistress, who 
had notice given her of the intended visit. The 
distance from the house of the grandee to the 
apartments of the gypsy was not great, but the 
lulling motion of the huge state-coach, and the 
softness of the velvet cushions had rocked his 
excellency into so sound a nap, that when his 
equipage stopped at the lady's door, there was not 
one of his retinue bold enough to undertake the 
invidious task of troubling his repose. The conse- 
quence was, that after a proper time was passed 
upon the halt for this brave commander to have 
waked, had nature so ordained it, the coach wheel- 
ed round, and his excellency having slept away his 
curiosity, had not, at the time when I left Madrid, 
ever cast his eyes upon the person of the incompa- 
rable Tiranna. I take for granted, my friend Pietra 
Santa drank the chocolate, and his excellency en- 
joyed the nap. I will only add, in confirmation of 
my anecdote, that the good Abbe Curtis, who had 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 367 

the honour of having educated this illustrious 
sleeper, verified the fact." 

Time passed on in the alternate amusements of 
beholding this extraordinary actress, and the com- 
pany which frequented his evening circle, when 
the period of his recall arrived, and he prepared to 
obey the mandate of his sovereign. The letter 
from Lord Hillsborough, which communicated this 
command, is an accurate specimen of courtly po- 
liteness and studied coldness of address to an un- 
successful agent, and shall be here transcribed : 

" Sir, "St. James's, Feb. 14, 1781, 

" I am sorry to find from your last letter, No. 19, 
and from that written from Count de Florida Blan- 
ca to Mr. Hussey, which the latter received at 
Lisbon, that an entire stop is put to the pleas- 
ing expectation, which had been formed from your 
residence in Spain. Had I been as well informed 
of the intentions of the court of Madrid, when you 
went abroad, as I now am, you would certainly 
not have had the trouble and fatigue of so long a 
voyage and journey. 

" There remains nothing now for me but to ac- 
quaint you, that I am commanded by the king to 
signify to you his majesty's pleasure, that you do 
immediately return to England ; when I say im- 
mediately, it is not intended that your departure 
should have the appearance of resentment, or that 
you should be deprived of the opportunity of ex- 



36S LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 

pressing a just sense of the marks of civility and 
attention which Mr. Cumberland has received 
since his arrival in Madrid. 

" I am, with great truth and regard, 



" Sir 



" Your most obedient 

" Humble servant, 
(Signed) " Hillsborough/' 

Whether the failure of Cumberland's negocia- 
tion was to be attributed to himself, to the insin- 
cerity of the ministry, or to whatever other cause, 
cannot, as I have already observed, be with cer- 
tainty known, while we have the testimony of only 
one person. In delivering this opinion I do not 
mean to infer the slightest suspicion of Cumber- 
land's veracity ; but there is, as Lord Shaftesbury 
has justly observed, " more of innocent delusion 
than voluntary imposture in the world, and they 
who have most imposed on mankind have been 
happy in a certain faculty, of imposing first upon 
themselves." This sort of delusion, it is natural to 
suppose, every man is in danger of, when he reviews 
his own conduct, and seeks to justify his proceed- 
ings against the aspersions or insinuations of others. 
The operations of self-love are so subtle and so in- 
cessant, that we are in equal peril of submitting 
to their influence from their imperceptible and 
from their habitual action. To silence the voice of 
reproof within our own bosoms, is an art which we 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 369 

are all willing to practise ; and that conduct which 
the eye of the world beholds with anger or disdain, 
we know how to trick forth in our imaginations, 
so as to make it acceptable to ourselves. 

Every man is conscious that he has sometimes 
employed this kind of sophistry, and hence, what- 
ever credibility is due to an individual, in testi- 
fying facts foreign to himself, the greatest caution 
may be justly used in receiving those by which 
his own proceedings are to be pronounced censur- 
able, or otherwise. All the rough asperities are 
then softened down with admirable dexterity, 
and to ourselves we explain how events happened, 
why they were frustrated, and how they might 
have succeeded, with a disregard of truth, blameless 
only so far as it is unintentional. 

Thus, in reading Cumberland's own account of 
his transactions in Spain, we find him doing every 
thing that could be done, yet failing, and incurring 
only the displeasure of his employers. Neither 
failure, however, nor the disapprobation of those 
under whom we act, are infallible criteria of right 
and wrong ; for the best schemes, however skilfully 
planned and conducted, may end in disappoint- 
ment, and in the gratitude of the great we have 
no security for justice towards our actions. It too 
commonly happens, indeed, that we estimate the 
value of most things by their degrees of success, 
not reflecting how much merit may have been 

2 B 



3/0 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

displayed on occasions which terminate unfavour- 
ably. " As the most just and honourable enter-* 
prises," observes the sagacious Fletcher, ofSal- 
toun, " when the}^ fail, are accounted in the num- 
ber of rebellions ; so all attempts, however unjust, 
if they succeed, always purge themselves of all 
guilt and suspicion/' 

Though the truth of this maxim, however, may 
be extended to humbler events than rebellions, it 
does not hence follow that success alone can jus- 
tify any measure ; nor, by a parity of reasoning 
can want of success be always a proof of want of 
judgment or of merit. We do not, indeed, find 
mankind uniformly judging so, and therefore, when 
a man fails in what he undertakes, while they who 
employed him, knowing the means he had of suc- 
ceeding, consider his failure as the fit object of 
reproof, it would be at least rational to conclude, in 
the absence of all testimony on one side, and with 
only the unsupported affirmations of the accused 
on the other, that some grounds for displeasure 
actually existed familiar enough to those who were 
best able to know them. 

Thus cautiously I wish to deliver my opinion 
upon the question of Cumberland's mission to 
Spain. He has himself discussed it with some 
degreeof mystery ; its precise object is no where dis- 
tinctly avowed, though it seems to have had some 
reference to a separate peace between that country 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 371 

and England. Involved in such obscurity, no- 
thing can be said of it more than what amounts 
to conjecture, and with a conjecture I leave it. 

Cumberland was naturallv solicitous to excul- 
pate himself, but, to have done this effectually, he 
should have told with more candour what he had 
to perform, with what means he was provided, how 
much he actually performed, and how much it 
was impossible to accomplish. Had he done this, 
every reader would have been, to a certain degree, 
a competent judge of his case ; but nothing posi- 
tive or decisive can be concluded from the vague 
statements which he makes. 

When Cumberland was preparing to depart from 
Madrid, he paid his farewell visit to the minister. 
What passed on that occasion is too honourable 
both to the Spanish monarch and to Cumberland, 
to be passed over without notice. He expressed 
the grateful sense he entertained of all the fa- 
vours and attentions which his Catholic Majesty 
had condescended to shew towards him and his 
family, and Florida Blanca replied to these ac- 
knowledgments in the following manner, with a 
solemn and deliberate utterance, " as one who 
wished that a word should not be lost." 

* Sir, — The king, my sovereign, has been en- 
tirely satisfied with every part of your conduct 
during the time you have resided among us. His 
majesty is convinced that you have done your 

2B/ 



372 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

duty to your own court, and exerted yourself with 
sincere good will to promote that pacification 
which circumstances, out of your reach to foresee 
or to controul, seem for the present to have sus- 
pended. And now, Sir, you will be pleased to 
take in good part what I have to say to you with 
regard to your claims for indemnification, on the 
score of your expences, in which I have reason to 
apprehend you will find yourself abandoned 
and deceived by your employers. I have it 
therefore in command to tell you, that the king 
my sovereign, has taken this into his gracious 
consideration, and tenders to you, through me, full 
and ample compensation for all expences, which 
you have incurred by your coming into Spain ; 
being unwilling that a gentleman, who has resorted 
to his court, and put himself under his immediate 
protection, without a public character, honestly 
endeavouring to promote the mutual good and be- 
nefit of both countries, should suffer, as you 
surely will do, if you withstand the offer which I 
have now the honour to make known to you/ 

"What I said in answer to this generous, but in- 
admissible, offer, I shall make no parade of ; it is 
enough to say, that I did not accept a single dollar 
from the King of Spain, or any in authority under 
him, which, as far as a negative can be proved, was 
made clear, when upon my journey homewards my 
bills were stopped, and my credit so completely 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 373 

bankrupt, that I might have gone to prison at 
Bayonne, if I had not borrowed five hundred 
pounds of my friendly fellow-traveller Marchetti, 
which enabled me to pay my way through France, 
and reach my own country. 

" How it came to pass that my circumstances 
should be so well known to Count Florida Blanca, 
is easily accounted for, when the dishonouring of 
my bills by Mr. Devisme, at Lisbon, through 
whose hands the Spanish banker passed them, 
was notorious to more than half Madrid, and 
could not be unknown to the minister. The fact 
is, that I had come into Spain without any other 
security than the good faith of government upon 
promise, pledged to me through Mr. Robinson, 
secretary of the treasury, that all bills drawn by 
me upon my banker in Pall Mall, should be in- 
stantly replaced to my credit, upon my accompa- 
nying them with a letter of advice to the said se- 
cretary Robinson. This letter of advice I regularly 
attached to every draft I made upon Messrs. Crofts, 
Devaynes, and Co. but from the day that I left 
London, to the day that I returned to it, including 
a period of fourteen months, not a single shilling 
was replaced to my account with my bankers, who 
persisted in advancing to my occasions with a li- 
berality and confidence in my honour, that I must 
ever reflect upon with the warmest gratitude. If 
I was improvident in relying upon these assur- 
ances, they who made them were inexcusable in 



374 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

breaking them, and betraying me into unmerited 
distress. I solemnly aver that I had the positive 
pledge of the treasury, through Mr. Robinson, for 
replacing every draught I should make upon my 
banker, and a very large sum was named, as appli- 
cable at my discretion, if the service should re- 
quire it. I could explain this further, but I for- 
bear. I had one thousand pounds advanced to me 
upon setting out ; my private credit supplied every 
farthing beyond that ; for the truth of which I 
need only to refer the reader to the following 
letter 

" To John Robinson, Esquire, &c. 

" Sir, " Madrid, Sth of March, 1781, 

" My banker informs me of a difficulty 

which has arisen in replacing the bills, which I 

have had occasion to draw upon him for the ex- 

pences of my commission at this court. 

" As I have not had the honour of hearing from 
you on this subject, and as it does not appear that 
he had seen you, when he wrote to me, the alarm 
which such an event would else have given me, is 
mitigated by this consideration, as I am sure there 
can be no intention in government to disgrace me 
at this cou rt, i n a commission , undertaken on my part 
without any other stipulation than that of defraying 
my expences. I flatter myself, therefore, that you 
have before this done what is needful, in confor- 
mity to what was settled on our parting. Suffer 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 3J5 

me to add, that by the partition I have made of 
my office with the gentleman who executes it, by 
the expences preparatory to my journey, all which 
I took on myself, and by many others since my 
departure, which I have not thought proper to put 
to the public account, I have greatly burthened 
my private affairs during my attendance on the bu- 
siness I am engaged in. 

6 That I have regulated my family here for the 
space of near a twelvemonth, with all possible 
economy, upon a scale in every respect as private, 
and void of ostentation, as possible, is notorious 
to all who know me here ; but a man must also 
know this court and country, to judge what the 
current charges of my situation must inevitably 
be ; what the occasional ones have been can only 
be explained by myself; and as I can clearly make 
it appear that I have neither misapplied the money 
nor abused the trust of government, in any in- 
stance, I cannot merit, and I am persuaded I shall 

not experience any misunderstanding or unkind- 
ness. 

' I have the honour to be, &c. 

< r. c: 

" I might have spared myself the trouble of this 
humiliating appeal. It produced just what it 
should produce — nothing; for it was addressed to 
the feelings of those who had no feelings ; and 



376 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

called for justice, where no justice was, no mercy, 
no compassion, honour or good faith. 

" I wearied the door of Lord North till his very 
servants drove me from it. I withstood the offer 
of a benevolent monarch, whose munificence 
would have rescued me; and I embraced ruin in 
my own country to preserve my honour as a sub- 
ject of it ; selling every acre of my hereditary estate, 
jointured on my wife by marriage settlement, who 
generously concurred in the sacrifice, which my 
improvident reliance upon the faith of government 
compelled me to make. 

" But I ought to speak of these things with 
more moderation, so many years having passed, 
and so many of the parties having died, since they 
took place. In prudence and propriety these 
pages ought not to have seen the light, till the 
writer of them was no more ; neither would they, 
could I have persisted in my resolution for with- 
holding them, till that event had consigned them 
into other hands ; but there is something para- 
mount to prudence and propriety, which wrests 
them from me — 

My poverty , but not my will, consents." 

I have permitted Cumberland to speak for him- 
self in this statement, because it is one in which 
his own testimony should be delivered in his own 
language. He says that he wrote down the speech 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 377 

of Florida Blanca into his entry book, and rendered 
it into English as was his invariable practice, from 
which he transcribed it into his Memoirs. This 
gives it a character of authenticity greater than if 
he had ventured to narrate it from recollection 
after a lapse of four and twenty years. 

With regard to the transaction itself, every one 
must applaud the dignified motives from which 
Cumberland acted, and the liberality of that go- 
vernment which gave him the opportunity of dis- 
playing such motives. lam not very familiar with 
the usages of courts on these occasions : but I 
believe it is not customary for a foreign power 
to offer an indemnification to the agent of a hostile 
nation. Something therefore may be justly ascribed 
to the individual honour, and integrity (in the 
estimation of the Spanish minister), with which 
Cumberland had discharged the delicate negociation 
entrusted to him. 

Why he was suffered to ruin himself in trans- 
acting the concerns of his own government, cannot 
perhaps now be known. His case, as he has 
stated it, was one of singular oppression. Whatever 
delinquency belonged to Cumberland, if any there 
was, might have found its due punishment in 
a regular way : but it does not appear that the 
refusal to reimburse his expenses arose from any 
intention of thus signifying displeasure, for the act 
commenced before any cause for that displeasure ex- 
isted or could exist : the bills which he drew upon 



378 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

his banker were not replaced from the first , which 
argued a deliberate intention to betray. There 
was, indeed, no specific declaration on the part of 
government that it would defray his expenses: but, 
there was something tantamount to such a declara- 
tion, the official correspondence between Cumber- 
land and Lord Hillsborough, and which, by sanc- 
tioning his mission, virtually pledged it to the due 
provision for executing that mission. If, indeed, 
the refusal to pay him arose from any evasion of 
this sort, language can supply no terms too strong 
for the reprobation of such political shuffling and 
insincerity : but the business cannot be defended 
upon any principle. It is at least the duty of the 
government to secure its agents from loss and injury 
in its service : and as no man's patriotism can 
be supposed greater than his prudence, it cannot 
be expected that any one will serve his country 
to his own ruin. Though, therefore, it might be 
said that Cumberland entered upon the negociation 
without any previous and distinct stipulation for the 
provision of his expenses, it was as obviously con- 
sistent with the common course of life that he 
shoitld expect such a provision, as that the porter 
who carries a parcel without first fixing his reward, 
should wait for his shilling when he has discharged 
his trust. 

That his frequent application to ministers, that 
his petitions and his memorials produced no ulti- 
mate recompense, while it excites our indigna- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 379 

tion may teach us this useful lesson, to act with 
courtiers as the law acts with every man, deem 
them knaves till they prove themselves the con- 
trary. 

When Cumberland received his regular recall 
and dismission from the station he occupied, he 
prepared to return to England. This he did, as I 
have already related, by a different road from what 
he proceeded in when journeying to Spain. He 
lengthened his travels by seeing as much of foreign 
nations as his opportunities would permit. His 
track he has described with tedious and unnecessary 
minuteness : he tells of every village he arrives at, 
and laments, with wearisome repetition, the paltry" 
and unsatisfying accommodations of Spanish inns. 
Without seeing any thing worthy of narration, 
without making anyinquiriesthat led to discoveries 
which the world miffht wish to know or be better 
for the knowledge of, he has merely filled forty or 
fifty pages with a dull recapitulation of what stages 
he performed, with what celerity the mules moved, 
or with what obstinacy the muleteers resisted 
all entreaties to amend their itinerary system. This 
was information which might well have been 
spared, to make room for more instructive details 
of which he gives only occasional and very brief 
glimpses. 

When he arrived at Bayonne, he found himself 
so extremely ill with fever that he was compelled 
to suspend his further progress, and call in medical 



380 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

assistance. Here he languished for three weeks, 
during which time the malady greatly emaciated 
and enfeebled him, and here, while thus prostrated 
by disease, he first heard the unwelcome tidings of 
his bills being stopped, and of his person being con- 
sequently subjected to arrest. From this impending 
danger, however, he was relieved by the kindness 
of a friend, (Marchetti) who lent him five hundred 
pounds. 

His mind being thus quieted, and co-operating 
with the healthful qualities of the climate in which 
he was, he soon found himself in a condition to 
resume his journey, which he did, travelling 
through Bourdeaux, Tours, Blois, and Orleans, to 
Paris, whence he proceeded to Ostend and there 
embarked for Margate, arriving in his house in 
Portland-Place, " to experience treatment which 
he had not merited, and to encounter losses he 



never overcame/' 



The only remarkable event that distinguished 
this long journey was the following, which I will 
relate in Cumberland's own words. 

" I will here simply relate," says he, " an in- 
cident without attempting to draw any conjectures 
from it, which is, that whilst I laid ill at Bayonne, 
insensible, and as it was supposed at the point of 
death, the very monk, who had been so troublesome 
to me at Elvas,* found his way into my chamber, 

* This was an Irish benedictine, who, when Cumberland was proceeding 
into Spain, entered his room one morning while at Elvas, vehemently 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 381 

and upon the alarm given by my wife who perfectly 
recognized his person, was only driven out of it 
by force. Again when I was in Paris, and about 
to sit down to dinner, a sallad was brought to me 
by the lacquey, who waited on me, which was given 
to him for me by a red-haired Dominican, whose 
person, according to his description, exactly tallied 
with that of the aforesaid monk ; I dispatched my 
servant Camis in pursuit of him, but he had escaped, 
and my suspicion of the sallad being poisoned was 
confirmed by experiment on a dog. 

" I shall only add that somewhere in Castile, I 
forget the place, but it was between Valladolid and 
Burgos, as I was sitting on a bench at the door of a 
house, where my Calasseros were giving water to 
the mules, I tendered my snuff box to a grave 
elderly man, who seemed of the better sort of 
Castilians, and who appeared to have thrown him- 
self in my way, sitting down beside me as one who 
invited conversation. The stranger looked steadily 
in my face, and after a pause put his fingers in my 
box, and, taking a very small portion of my snuff 
between them, said to me, — e I am not afraid, Sir, 
of trusting myself to you, whom I know to be an 
Englishman, and a person, in whose honour I may 

inveighing against England and her government ; and when Cumberland 
entered his carriage he walked by the side of it, pertinaciously resisting 
his progress and anathematising the drivers if they dared to move onwards ; 
nor did he quit his post, or cease from his vociferations, till they had passed 
through all the outposts and were in sight of Badajoz. 



3S2 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

perfectly repose. But there is death concealed in 
many a man's snuff box, and I would seriously 
advise you on no account to take a single pinch 
from the box of any stranger, who may offer it to 
you ; and if you have done that already, I sincerely 
hope no such consequences as I allude to will 
result from your want of caution/ I continued in 
conversation with this stranger for some time ; I 
told him I had never before been apprised of the 
practices he had spoken of, and, being perfectly 
without suspicion, I might, or might not, have 
exposed myself to the danger, he was now so kind 
as to apprize me of, but I observed to him that 
however prudent it might be to guard myself against 
such evil practices in other countries, I should not 
expect to meet them in Castile, where the Spanish 
point of honour most decidedly prevailed. c Ah, 
Senor/ he replied, 4 they may not all be Spaniards, 
whom you have chanced upon, or shall hereafter 
chance upon, in Castile/ When I asked him how 
this snuff operated on those who took it, his 
answer was, as I expected — e On the brain/ I was 
not curious to enquire who this stranger was, as I 
paid little attention to his information at the time, 
though I confess it occurred to me, when after a 
few days I was seized with such agonies in my 
head, as deprived me of my senses : I merely give 
this anecdote, as it occurred ; I draw no inferences 
from it/' 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 383 

There is enough of agreeable mystery in this 
account to serve a novel-writer for the basis of a 
terrible incident. How might he paint an insidious 
assassin lurking about to snare his victim with a 
pinch of snufT; and death entering at an avenue 
hitherto unused in fiction. 



384 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

CHAP. XVIII. 

Cumberland's forbearance in relating the treatment, 
he received from the English government. — His 
Memorial, addressed to Lord North. — Its 
failure. — His warm remonstrances to Mr. Secre- 
tary Robinson. — Retires to Tunbridge . — 
Celebrates that place in his Memoirs and in 
Retrospection . — The pleasures of reading. — 
The family which accompanied him to Tunbridge, 
— Publishes his Anecdotes of Spanish 
Painters. — Accused of attaching Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. — Examination of this charge. — 
Brief history of painting in Spain.' — His comedy 
of the W A lloons acted. — His character of Hen- 
derson. — The sneering scepticism of Da vies 
reproved. 

I have dwelt much longer upon Cumberland's 
narrative of what occurred to him in Spain than it 
was, at first, my intention to do : nor should I 
have departed from that intention had I not become 
impressed with the idea that it formed a remarkable 
era in the life of a literary man, that it was dis- 
tinguished by circumstances of a peculiar nature, 
and that Cumberland had been treated with a de- 
gree of injustice, by his employers, too flagrant to 
be passed over without some expression of ab- 
horrence. 

His own recital of this injustice is written with- 
out any acrimony. He tells of it as of a misfortune 
which befell him, but he does not vent reproaches 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 3S5 

or insults against those who were the authors of that 
misfortune. Helaments the loss which he sustained, 
and the privations which such a loss must force 
upon a man who means to live honestly in society; 
but he laments it with the sensibility of a wounded, 
not with the bitterness of a resentful, heart. This 
meekness, this charitable oblivion of so violent an 
injury, of an injury whose consequences extended 
to the last moment of his life, and under which he 
bent at the very moment when he wrote, deserves 
to be recorded with the highest approbation : it 
adds a lustre to his misfortune, and awakens the 
pity and veneration of those who contemplate a 
man nearly in his eightieth year, temperately re- 
counting the adverse strokes of unmerited misfor- 
tune by which his proudest hopes of life were 
blighted. 

With what injustice he seems to have been 
treated, and what claims he appears to have had 
upon the government, the following memorial will 
shew : — 

" To the Right Honourable Lord North, 
&c. &c. &c. 
" The humble Memorial of Richard Cumberland 
" Sheweth, 

" That your Memorialist, in April 
1730, received his Majesty's most secret and con- 
fidential orders and instructions to set out for the 
court of Spain in company with the Abbe Hussey, 
one of his Catholic Majesty's chaplains, for the 

2C 



336 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

purpose of negociating a separate peace with that 
court. 

" That to render the object of this commission 
more secret, your Memorialist was directed to take 
his family with him to Lisbon, under the pretence 
of recovering the health of one of his daughters, 
which he accordingly did, and having sent the 
Abbe Hussey before him to the Court of Spain, 
agreeably to the King's instructions, your Memo- 
rialist and his family soon after repaired to Aran- 
juez, where his Catholic Majesty then kept his 
court. 

" That your Memorialist upon setting out on 
this important undertaking received, by the hands 
of John Robinson, Esquire, one of the secretaries 
of the Treasury, the sum of one thousand pounds 
on account, with directions how he should draw, 
through the channel of Portugal, upon his banker 
in England for such further sums as might be ne- 
cessary, (particularly for a large discretionary sum 
to be employed, as occasion might require, in secret 
services) and your Memorialist was directed to 
accompany his drafts by a separate letter to Mr. 
Secretary Robinson, advising him what sum or 
sums he had given order for, that the same might 
be replaced to your Memorialist's credit with the 
bank of Messieurs Crofts and Co. in Pall-Mali. 

" That your Memorialist, in the execution of 
this commission, for the space of nearly fourteen 
months, defrayed the expenses of Abbe Hussey's 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 387 

separate journey into Spain, paid all charges in- 
curred by him during four months residence there, 
and supplied him with money for his return to 
England, no part of which has been repaid to your 
Memorialist. 

" That your Memorialist, with his family, took 
two very long and expensive journies, (the one by 
way of Lisbon, and the other through France) no 
consideration for which has been granted to him. 

" That your Memorialist, during his residence 
in Spain, was obliged to follow the removals of the 
court to Aranjuez, San Ildefonso, the Escurial, and 
Madrid, besides frequent visits to the Pardo: in 
all which places, except the Pardo, he was obliged 
to lodge himself, the expense of which can only be 
known to those, who in the service of their court 
have incurred it. 

" That every article of necessary expense, being 
inordinately high in Madrid, your Memorialist, 
without assuming any vain appearance of a mi- 
nister, and with as much domestic frugality as pos- 
sible, incurred a very heavy charge. 

" That your Memorialist having no courier with 
him, nor any cypher, was obliged to employ his 
own servant in that trust, and the servant of Abbe 
Hussey, at his own proper cost, no part of which 
has been repaid to him. 

" That your Memorialist did, at considerable 
charge, obtain papers and documents, containing 
information of a very important nature, which need 

2 C 2 



388 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

not here be enumerated ; of which charge so in- 
curred no part has been repaid. 

" That upon the capture of the East and West 
India ships by the enemy, your Memorialist was 
addressed by many of the British prisoners, some 
of whom he relieved with money, and in all cases 
obtained the prayer of their memorials. Your 
Memorialist also, through the favour of the Bishop 
of Burgos, took with him out of Spain some va- 
luable British seamen, and restored them to his 
Majesty's fleet ; and this also he did at his own cost. 

" That your Memorialist, during his residence 
in Spain, was indispensibly obliged to cover these 
his un voidable expenses by several drafts upon his 
banker to the amount of 4,5001. of which not one 
single bill has been replaced, nor one farthing issued 
to his support during fourteen months expensive 
and laborious duty in the King's immediate and 
most confidential service ; the consequence of 
which unparalleled treatment was, that your Me- 
morialist was stopped and arrested at Bayonne, by 
order, from his remittancers at Madrid ; in this 
agonizing situation your Memorialist, being then in 
the height of a most violent fever, surrounded by a 
family of helpless women in an enemy's country, 
and abandoned by his employers, on whose faith 
he had relied, found himself incapable of proceed- 
ing on his journey, and destitute of means for sub- 
sisting where he was : under this accumulated 
distress he must have sunk and expired, had not 



LITE OF CUMBERLAND. SS9 

the generosity of an officer in the Spanish service, 
who had acompanied him into France, supplied his 
necessities with the loan of five hundred pounds, 
and passed the King of Great Britain's bankrupt 
servant into his own country, for which humane 
action this friendly officer, (Marchetti by name), 
was arrested at Paris, and by the Count D'Aranda 
remanded back to Madrid, there to take his chance 
for what the influence of France may find occasion 
to devise against him. 

" Your Memorialist, since his return to England, 
having, after innumerable attempts, gained one 
only admittance to your lordship's person, for the 
space of more than ten months, and not one answer 
to the frequent and humble suit he has made to 
you by letter, presumes now, for the last time, to 
solicit your consideration of his case, and as he is 
persuaded it is not, and cannot be, in your lordship's 
heart to devote and abandon to unmerited ruin an 
old and faithful servant of the crown, who has been 
the father of four sons, (one of whom has lately 
died, and three are now carrying arms in the ser- 
vice of their King), your Memorialist humbly prays, 
that you will give order for him to be relieved in 
such manner, as to your lordship's wisdom shall 
seem meet — 

" All which is humbly submitted by 
" Your lordship's most obedient 
" And most humble servant, 
" Richard Cumberland." 



390 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

This memorial, thus simply, perspicuously, and, 
in some parts, affectingly urged, produced, as the 
reader may anticipate, no benefit to Cumberland. 
Lord North, he thought, never read it ; a brief en- 
comium on his lordship's candour and sincerity ; 
but, though he did not affect to exonerate him 
from all culpability, he justly considered Mr. Se- 
cretary Robinson as the one who had the largest 
share of obloquy in the business. It was his duty, 
Cumberland conceived, to solicit the fulfilment 
of that promise which had been made through him, 
and it was in his power, he believed, to have 
obtained that fulfilment, had he chosen to solicit 
it. To him, therefore, as to one who was more 
immediately the cause of his misfortune, he ad- 
dressed several warm remonstrances ; remonstrances, 
indeed, of such a character, as no man of spirit, in 
Cumberland^ opinion, " ought to have put up 
with ;*- he did put up with them, however, either 
because he wanted spirit to resent them, or be- 
lieved that he was not bound to view them as 
personal accusations. 

With Lord North Cumberland eventually be- 
came intimate, when the awful visitation of blind- 
ness had reduced him to a state of mortifying help- 
lessness, and robbed him of all external sources of 
comfort. It was then, however, that he appeared 
more truly great than when extrinsic and acci- 
dental greatness belonged to him ; it was then that 
the powers of his mind, the resources of his ge- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 39 1 

nius, the stores of his memory, and the brilliancy 
of his imagination, were displayed with a grace and 
profusion which seemed to be increased by the ma- 
lady that oppressed him; or, perhaps, the spectator 
instinctively drew a comparison between his bodily 
condition, and the intellectual vigour which he exhi- 
bited, as we are apt to aggrandise the superiority of 
whatever is performed under seeming disabilities 
till the probable at last swells into the marvellous. 

With Lord George Germain also, he continued 
to live in uninterrupted friendship, both while he 
presided at the Board of Trade, and after he had 
resigned that office. He represents himself, in- 
deed, as having sometimes conducted some delicate 
transactions for his lordship, and in a manner 
always satisfactory to him. This was in conse- 
quence of the great number of American loyalists 
who, on his levee days, usually resorted to him ; 
and he mentions one instance, in particular, of a 
naval officer, who had written a letter to Lord 
George Germain, containing expressions highly 
disrespectful to him and to Cumberland, upon 
whom he immediately waited, and compelled him 
to write and sign an apology of his own dictating. 

When Lord North's administration was sub- 
verted, and the Board of Trade was dissolved by 
the operations of what is commonly called Burke's 
Bill, Cumberland was dismissed with a compensa- 
tion which he represents as less than a moiety of 
what he was deprived of. This diminution of his 



392 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

pecuniary resources, concurring with his Spanish 
losses, which had compelled him to sacrifice the 
patrimony he was born to, reduced him to the 
necessity of diminishing his expenditure, and 
of providing an establishment more suitable to his 
income. 

London, however, is not the place where a pub- 
lic man can best pursue plans of economy ; nor, 
perhaps, is it desirable that any place should be at 
once the scene of liberal competency, and of sub- 
sequent embarrassment. A man commonly flies 
from a spot that has witnessed his prosperity, 
when he can no longer maintain even the appearance 
of it ; and it is the surest way, indeed, to avoid the 
painful retrospections of our own mind, and the 
suspicious condolence of our friends and acquaint* 
ance. 

Cumberland, therefore, forsook the metropolis, 
and, with the remnant of bis shattered fortune, 
sought peace and health in the retreats of Tun- 
bridge, nor had he ever afterwards, according to his 
own declaration, an abiding place in town. The 
comforts and conveniencies of this spot he has ce- 
lebrated in his Memoirs, and he had reason to do 
so, for he says, that " during the whole of his 
long residence at Tunbridge Wells, he never ex- 
perienced a single hour's indisposition that con- 
fined him to his bed," though previously to that 
period he had undergone as much illness, and 
fought as hardly for his life with fevers, as most men. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 393 

Of his residence at this place, and of some of 
the events that befell him there, he thus pleas- 
ingly speaks in the poem which he published so 
shortly before his death : 

" Hail to thee, Tunbridge ! Hail, Hygeian fount! - 

Still as thy waters flow, may they dispense 

Health to the sick and comfort to the sad ! 

Sad I came to thee, comfortless and sick 

Of many sorrows : still th' envenom'd shaft 

Of base injustice rankl'd in my breast ; 

Still on my haggard cheek the fever hung— 

' My only recompense' — Thirty long years 

Have blanch'd my temples since I first was taught 

The painful truth, that I but mock'd my hopes, 

And fool'd my senses, whilst I went astray 

To palaces and courts to search for that, 

Which dwells not in them.— No : to you, my books ! 

To you, the dear companions of my youth, 

Still my best comforters, I turn'd for peace : 

To you at morning break I came, with you 

Again I commun'd o'er the midnight lamp, 

And haply rescu'd from the abyss of time 

Some precious relics of the Grecian muse, 

Which else had perish'd : These were pleasing toils, 

For these some learned men, who knew how deep 

I delv'd to fetch them up, have giv'n me praise, 

And I am largely paid ; of this no court, 

No craft can rob me, and I boldly trust 

The treasure will not perish at my death. 

Here, wrapt in meditation, I enjoy'd 
My calm retreat ; here in the honest hearts 
Of a brave peasantry I now repos'd 
That confidence, which never was betray'd 
By them, nor from them shall it be withdrawn 
To the last moment of my life, by me. 
Four gallant sons, 'twixt land and sea, I shar'd ; 
My country had them all ; and two had died 
On distant shores beyond the Atlantic stream. 



394} LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

When England call'd her volunteers to arms, 
And rear'd her beacon on the neighb'ring hill, 
That overhangs our hamlet : At the call 
Uprose my brave compatriots, seiz'd their arms, 
Flock' d to the standard of unconquer'd* Kent, 
And bade me lead them forth ; I took the sword, 
Gift of their love, on which they had engrav'd 
A pledge by them kept sacred through a course 
Of nine years faithful service, and I trust 
Till by command I took my last sad leave, 
My eye was never from them, nor my heart." 

One part of the preceding extract (that where 
he commemorates the many hours of unalloyed 
happiness which he derived from his books), will 
be read by every literary man with a pleasing con- 
sciousness of its truth. How few reflections upon 
the employment of time, indeed, can equal those 
which a scholar feels when he retraces in his ima- 
gination the hours he has devoted to voluntary 
and secluded study. The remembrance of past 
actions, on which virtue has fixed her approving 
stamp, may equal, but certainly cannot surpass 
them. In a mind tinctured with the love of 
knowledge, every pleasing idea is associated, as it 
contemplates those moments of placid enjoyment 
when instruction was silently insinuating itself, 
and when every day opened new stores of intellec- 
tual wealth which the eager pupil of wisdom 
panted to possess. Inanimate objects become 
connected with our progress, and we remember, 
with delight, the shady walk, the silent grove, 
or the beauteous landscape, where we first 

* Invicta, the motto to the arms of Kent. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. $9o 

opened some favourite volume, or first dwelt upon 
some matchless effusion of the muse still che- 
rished by the memory. These are emotions fami- 
liar to the bosom of every student, and they are 
such as ever come with welcome, for they 
revive the recollection of a period which is 
endeared to him by the most pleasing images of 
past felicity. Our advancement in knowledge, or 
our completion of what we wish to know, is at- 
tended by few of those gay and inspiriting sensa- 
tions which accompany our initiation, when all 
before us is new and untried, and hope promises, 
with flattering delusion, all that we wish, and 
more than we find. 

Books are companions which accommodate 
themselves, with unreproaching willingness, to all 
our humours. If we are jocund, or if we are sad, 
if we are studious to learn, or desirous only to be 
amused, he that has a relish for reading, will find 
the ready means of supplying all his intellectual 
w r ants in the silence of his library. They are 
friends whom no estimation can overvalue ; they 
are always at our call, and ready to offer their aid 
and consolation ; nor need we overstrain our de- 
sires by courtesy, for the moment they cease to be 
welcome we may dismiss them from our society 
without fear of reproach or offence. Of what 
other friends can we say as much ? 

Cumberland, though he retired to them 
from the tumults of public life, was not des- 



396 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tined, however, to find undisturbed repose. He 
perceived the health of his wife declining, and 
he perceived it with an aggravation of sorrow 
which must have struck deep into a mind possess- 
ing sensibility. " She was sinking under the 
effects which her late sufferings and exertions, in 
attending upon him, had entailed upon her." 
This was not, indeed, the fault of Cumberland, 
but surely it was his misfortune ; and dear as must 
be the recollection of a wife, who sacrifices her 
own existence in discharging her duty to her hus- 
band in sickness and affliction, still, the remem- 
brance that it was a sacrifice weighs heavily upon 
the heart, and embitters our sorrows with some- 
thing like remorse. 

Cumberland bears the most unequivocal testi- 
mony to the virtues and fidelity of his wife, and 
it is pleasing to contemplate a picture of conjugal 
harmony, of sincerity, love, and confidence, in 
marriage, which is so rarely to be found. Some- 
thing, no doubt, may be attributed to that tender- 
ness with which we instinctively mention the dead ; 
but even with that deduction there remains little 
reason to doubt that he found a degree of connu- 
bial happiness of which he might justly boast. 

The family which accompanied him to Tun- 
bridge Wells were, besides his wife, his second 
daughter Sophia, his infant one Marianne, and his 
three surviving sons, Richard, Charles, and Wil- 
liam. His eldest daughter had married Lord 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 397 

Edward Bentjnck, brother to the Duke of Portland ; 
and his second son, George, had been killed at the 
siege of Charlestown, the very day after he had 
been appointed to the command of an armed 
vessel. 

Shortly after his return from Spain, he published 
his " Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain," 
in two small octavo volumes. This was a work of 
original research, and introduced to the lovers of 
the art, and to artists, the names and productions 
of men very little known beyond the limits of their 
own country. Many of the anecdotes are amusing 
and interesting. Of the accuracy of his notions, 
however, with respect to the art itself, I can say 
nothing, but what would expose my own igno- 
rance ; but I have heard an artist of some emi- 
nence acknowledge the general taste and fidelity 
of Cumberland's opinions. To these anecdotes 
he afterwards added another publication, " An 
accurate and descriotive catalogue of the several 
paintings in the King of Spain's Palace at Madrid, 
with some account of the pictures in the Buen- 
Retiro." 

This catalogue was the first that had been made, 
and was now done by the permission of the king 
of Spain, at Cumberland's request, being trans- 
mitted to him after his return to England. 

As if the malice of criticism, however, delighted 
to vex a man who was so sensible of its power, Cum- 
berland had no sooner published these Anecdotes 



39& LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

than he was accused of having violently and unjustly 
attacked, in the second volume, the character of 
his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds. Such a charge, 
living, as he then was, in habits of close intimacy 
with Reynolds, must have come with aggravated 
force ; and Cumberland is at some pains, in his 
Memoirs, to vindicate himself from its truth. The 
supposed injury was committed in that part of the 
second volume where he is speaking of Mengs, 
and as the passage is not long I will extract it. 

" Mengs loved the truth, but he did not always 
find it out ; under all the disadvantages of a con- 
tracted education, and soured by the insupport- 
able severity of his father's discipline, his habit 
became saturnine and morose, and his manners 
unsocial and inelegant : he had a great propensity 
for speaking what are called plain truths, but 
which oftentimes, in fact, are no truths' at all. His 
biographer and edifor Azara, has given us an in- 
stance of this sort!, in a reply he made to Pope 
Clement XIV. His Holiness had asked Mengs's 
opinion of some pictures he had collected at Ve- 
nice. They are good for nothing, said Mengst 
How so ? rejoined his Holiness, they have been 
highly commended — naming a certain painter as 
his authority for their merit. Most Holy Father, 
replied Mengs, we are both professors of the same 
art ; he extols what he cannot equal, and I depre- 
ciate what I am sensible I can excel. N, y. yo 
somos dos profesores. El uno alaha lo que es supe- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 399 

rior a su esfera ; y el otro vitupera lo que le es supe- 
rior. I should suspect that Clement thought very 
little the worse of his pictures, and not much the 
better of Mengs for his repartee. Whether Mengs 
really thought with contempt of art which was in- 
ferior to his own, I will not pretend to decide ; but 
that he was apt to speak contemptuously of artists 
superior to himself, I am inclined to believe ; 
Azara tells us, that he pronounced of the academi- 
cal lectures of our Reynolds, that they were calcu- 
lated to mislead young students into error, teach- 
ing nothing but those superficial principles which he 
plainly avers are all that the author himself knows 
of the art he professes. Del libro moderno del Sr. 
Raynolds, Ingles^ decia que es una obra, que puede 
conducir los juvenes al error; posque se queda en 
los principios superjiciales que conoce solamente a 
quel autor. Azara immediately proceeds to say 
that Mengs was of a temperament colericoy adusto, 
and that his bitter and satirical turn created him 
infinites agraviados y quejosos. When his histo- 
rian and friend says this there is no occasion for 
me to repeat the remark. If the genius of Mengs 
had been capable of producing a composition equal 
to that of the tragic and pathetic Ugolino, I am 
persuaded such a sentence as the above would 
never have passed his lips ; but flattery made him 
vain, and sickness rendered him peevish ; he 
found himself at Madrid, in a country without 
rivals, and because the arts had travelled out of 



400 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND* 

his sight, he was disposed to think they existed 
nowhere but on his own pallet. The time, per- 
haps, is at hand, when our virtuosi will extend 
their route to Spain, and of these some one will 
probably be found, who, regarding with just indig- 
nation, these dogmatical decrees of Mengs, will 
take in hand the examination of his paintings, 
which I have now enumerated ; and we may then be 
told, with the authority of science, that his Nati- 
vity, though so splendidly encased, and covered 
with such care, that the very winds of Heaven are 
not permitted to visit its face too roughly, would 
have owed more to the chrystal than it does in 
some parts, at least, had it been less transparent 
than it is ; that it discovers an abortive and puisny 
bambino, which seems copied from a bottle ; that 
Mengs was an artist who had seen much, and in- 
vented little ; that he dispenses neither life nor 
death to his figures, excites no terror, rouses no 
passions, and risques no flights; that by studying 
to avoid particular defects, he incurs general ones, 
and paints with tameness and servility : that the 
contracted scale and idea of a painter of minia- 
tures, as which he was brought up, is to be traced 
in all or most of his compositions, in which a 
finished delicacy of pencil exhibits the Hand of 
the Artist, but gives no emanations of the Soul of 
the Master: if it is beauty, it does not warm; 
if it is sorrow, it excites no pity. That when 
the Angel announces the salutation to Mary, 
it is a messenger that has neither used dis- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 401 

patch in the errand, nor grace in the delivery ; that 
although Rubens was by one of his oracular sayings 
condemned to the ignominious dullness of a Dutch 
translator, Mengs was as capable of painting 
Rubens's Adoration, as he was of creating the Star 
in the East that ushered the Magi : but these are 
questions above my capacity ; I resign Mengs to 
abler critics, and Reyrtolds to better defenders ; 
well contented that posterity should admire them 
both, and well assured that the fame of our coun- 
tryman is established beyond the reach of envy or 
detraction/' 

If the reader be ss willingly disposed as I am to 
acquit Cumberland of all intentional depreciation 
of his friend's merits, he may still think, however, 
that it was a needless violation of kindness to dif- 
fuse the knowledge even of another's opinion when 
it tended to bring his abilities into question. It 
was at least in his power to have shewn forbear- 
ance ; and when he found that so unequivocal a 
censure had been passed upon his friend ^ by a 
foreign writer, he might have forborne to give it 
currency by translating it. It is true he afterwards 
undertakes his vindication : but is not this like 
a man who first wounds you and then very assi= 
duously runs about to procure assistance, and to 
stanch the blood ? 

Perhaps the reader will not be displeased to find 
here the brief history of painting in Spain, with 
which Cumberland has preceded his Anecdotes, 
, 2D 



402 LIFE OF CUMBEPwLAND. 

The work is not very commonly to be met with, 
and the topic is one not yet rendered worthless by 
familiarity. 

" Spain has given birth to so many eminent 
painters, of whom there is no memorial in the rest 
of Europe, and abounds with so many admirable 
examples of their art, dispersed in churches, con- 
vents, and palaces, where the curiosity of modern 
travellers rarely carries them, that I persuade my- 
self it will not be unacceptable to the public to 
have some account of men and works so little 
known and yet so highly worthy to be recorded. 
I am not aware that this has been professedly at- 
tempted by any Spanish writer, except by Palo~ 
mino ; who in an elaborate treatise on the Art of 
Fainting, in two folio volumes, has inserted the 
lives of two hundred and thirty-three painters 
and sculptors, who flourished in Spain from the 
time of Ferdinand the Catholic to the conclusion of 
the reign of Philip the Fourth; of these materials I 
have principally availed myself in the following 
sheets, but not without due attention to other 
authorities, that interpose accounts differing from 
his, or extend to particulars, which he has failed 
to enumerate. He is said to have written with a 
competent knowledge of his subject, as an art, of 
which he was himself a professor; and in rules for 
the practice of painting he is very diffusive: if he 
had been more communicative or entertaining in 
those matters, for which I chiefly consulted him, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 403 

I might have needed less apology for the present 
publication : many particulars however have been 
furnished to me from tradition, which help out the 
sterility and dryness of his catalogue ; and I must 
not omit to acknowledge the assistance I drew 
from the treatise of Pacheco, a book now become 
extremely rare and hardly to be obtained. I know 
there was an English abridgement of Palomino's 
Painters published in the year 1739, but the ori- 
ginal is in very few hands ; so that, unless some 
Spanish biographer shall speedily be found with 
public spirit to engage in the task of rescuing the 
fame of his ingenious countrymen from approaching 
extinction, their histories at least will soon be lost, 
whatever may be the fate of their works. The world 
is in possession of many memoirs of the artists of 
Italy, France, and Flanders ; and the painters, who 
distinguished themselves in England, have by happy 
fortune found a biographer, whose entertaining ta- 
lents will secure to them a reception with posterity; 
whilst of all the painters, to whose memory I have 
dedicated this slight attempt, scarce a name is 
heard without the limits of Spain, except those of 
Velasquez, Murillo, and Ribeira: the paintings of 
the latter it is true are very generally known, many 
excellent performances of his being dispersed 
through Europe : some respectable remains of 
Velasquez are to be found in Italy, but the principal 
exertions of his pencil were reserved for his own 
country, and the sovereign, who entertained him 

2 D2 



404? LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

in his service; these, we may naturally suppose, 
can never be extracted : and as for Murillo, al- 
though some pieces of his have in time past been 
extracted from Seville, yet I think I may venture 
to say, that not many of them, which pass under 
his name, are legitimate ; and in a less proportion 
can we find amongst such, as are true pictures, any 
of so capital a rank, as to impart a competent idea 
of his extraordinary merit. 

" The candid reader will observe, that I do not 
profess to give the Lives of the Painters, who are 
treated of in this catalogue, for which my materials 
do not suffice ; nor shall I hazard many criticisms 
upon their respective works, for which more sci- 
ence would be requisite than I can pretend to ; 
still I hope there will be found sufficient novelty 
to amuse such of my readers, as can endure to 
hear of paintings, as they strike the feelings of an 
ordinary observer, without presuming to dissect 
tftem in the learned jargon of a Virtuoso. It will 
be remembered, therefore, that I offer nothing more 
to the public than Anecdotes of the Eminent 
Painters, who have flourished in Spain during the 
two centuries last past ; and in this description I 
include all such illustrious foreigners, as have re- 
sorted to Spain for the display of their talents 
under protection of the princes or nobles of that 
kingdom ; these are a pretty numerous class, and 
in treating of them I shall study to avoid repeating 
what may have been better told by others ; but 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 40o 

even of these perhaps some local anecdotes will 
occur, which may at least be supplementary to the 
accounts already in existence. My residence in 
Spain, and some advantages incident to my pe- 
culiar situation there, gave me repeated access to 
every thing I wished to see; almost every religious 
foundation throughout the kingdom contains a 
magazine of art ; in resorting to these nothing will 
be found, of which a stranger can complain, unless 
of the gloominess of some of the edifices, and the 
unfavourable lights, in which many capital paint- 
ings are disposed: in private houses it is not un- 
usual to discover very fine pictures in neglect and 
decay ; thrown aside amongst the rubbish of cast-* 
off furniture; whether it be, that the possessor has 
no knowledge of their excellence, or thinks it below 
his notice to attend to their preservation ; but 
how much soever the Spaniards have declined from 
their former taste and passion for the elegant arts, 
I am persuaded they have in no degree fallen off 
from their national character for generosity, which 
is still so prevalent amongst them, that a stranger, 
who is interestedly disposed to avail himself of 
their munificence, may in a great measure obtain 
whatever is the object of his praise and admiration : 
as for the royal collections at Madrid, the Escurial, 
and elsewhere, he will meet a condescension so 
accommodated to his curiosity, that the one is as 
little likely to be exhausted as the other; the 
facility of access to every palace in possession of 



406 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

his Catholic Majesty is only to be equalled by the 
gratification it produces." 

Before Cumberland had settled himself at Tun- 
bridge, he produced his comedy of the Walloons in 
1782. The character of Father Sullivan (in which 
it was thought, by many, that the author intended 
an adumbration of his late colleague in the Spanish 
mission, the Abbe Hussey), was written expressly 
for Henderson, who wished to have him drawn 
" a fine bold-faced villain," (to use his own lan- 
guage) " the direst and deepest in nature, so he 
had but motives strong enough to bear him out, 
and such a prominency of natural character, as 
should secure him from the contempt of his au- 
dience." In obedience to these injunctions Cum- 
berland drew the character : but the play was not 
very successful. 

Of Henderson so much less is known than must 
be wished by every inquirer into dramatic history, 
that 1 am tempted to conclude this chapter by 
inserting what little Cumberland has told of him. 
He knew him well, and seems to have had much 
regard for his character, and sufficient admiration 
of his talents, though he was not successful in pro- 
curing an engagement for him with Garrick. 

" He was an actor," says he, " of uncommon 
powers, and a man of the brightest intellect, formed 
to be the delight of society, and few indeed are 
those men oi distinguished talents, who have been 
more prematurely lost to the world, or more lastingly 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 407 

regretted. What he was on the stage, those who 
recollect his FalstarT, Shylock, Sir Giles Overreach, 
and many other parts of the strong cast, can fully 
testify; what he was at his own fire-side and in 
his social hours, all, who were within the circle of 
his intimates, will not easily forget. He had an 
unceasing flow of spirits, and a boundless fund of 
humour, irresistibly amusing; he also had wit, pro- 
perly so distinguished, and from the specimens, 
which I have seen of his sallies in verse, levelled 
at a certain editor of a public print, who had an- 
noyed him with his paragraphs, I am satisfied he 
had talents at his command to have established a 
very high reputation as a poet. I was with him 
one morning, when he was indisposed, and his 
physician, Sir John Eliot, paid him a visit. The 
doctor, as is well known, was a merry little being, 
who talked pretty much at random, and oftentimes 
with no great reverence for the subjects, which he 
talked upon ; upon the present occasion, however, 
he came professionally to enquire how his medi- 
cines had succeeded, and in his northern accent 
demanded of his patient — c Had he taken the palls 
that he sent him* — c He had* — 'Well ! and how 
did they agree ? What had they done ?'-**' Won* 
ders, replied Henderson ; I survived them' — ' To 
be sure you did, said the doctor, and you must 
take more of 'em, and live for ever : I make all my 
patients immortal' — ' That is exactly what I am 
afraid of, doctor, rejoined the patient. I met a 



408 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

lady of my acquaintance yesterday : you know 
her very well : she was in bitter affliction, crying 
and bewailing herself in a most piteous fashion : I 
asked what had happened; a melancholy event; 
her dearest friend was at death's door'-^-' What is 
her disease, cried the doctor ?' — 4 That is the very 
question 1 asked, replied Henderson ; but she was 
in no danger from her disease ; *twas very slight ; 
a mere excuse for calling in a physician' — ' Why, 
what the devil are you talking about, rejoined the 
doctor, if she had called in a physician, and there 
was no danger in the disease, how could she be 
said to be at death's door ?' — ' Because, said Hen- 
derson, she had called in you : every body calls 
you in ; you dispatch a world of business, and, if 
you come but once to each, your practice must 
have made you very rich'—' Nay, nay, quoth Sir 
John, I am not rich in this world ; I lay up my 
treasure in heaven' — ' Then you may take leave of 
it for ever, rejoined the other, for you have laid it 
up where you will never find it.* 

" Henderson's memory was so prodigious, that 
I dare not risque the instance which 1 could give 
of it, not thinking myself entitled to demand more 
credit than I should probably be disposed to give. 
In his private character, many good and amiable 
qualities might be traced, particularly in his con- 
duct towards an aged mother, to whom he bore a 
truly filial attachment ; and in laying up a provision 
for his wife and daughter he was at least sufficiently 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 409 

careful and ceconomical. He was concerned with 
the elder Sheridan in a course of public readings: 
there could not be a higher treat than to hear his 
recitations from parts and passages in Tristram 
Shandy: let him broil his dish of sprats, seasoned 
with the sauce of his pleasantry, and succeeded by 
a desert of Trim and my uncle Toby, it was an 
entertainment worthy to be enrolled amongst the 
nodes ccenasque Divum. I once heard him read 
part of a tragedy, and but once ; it was in his own 
parlour, and he ranted most outrageously : he was 
conscious how ill he did it, and laid it aside before 
he had finished it. It was clear he had not studied 
that most excellent property of pitching his voice 
to the size of the room he was in ; an art, which so 
few readers have, but which Lord Mansfield was 
allowed to possess in perfection. He was an ad- 
mirable mimic, and in his sallies of this sort he 
invented speeches and dialogues, so perfectly ap- 
propriate to the characters he was displaying, that 
I don't doubt but many good sayings have been 
given to the persons he made free with, which 
being fastened on them by him in a frolic, have 
stuck to them ever since, and perhaps gone down 
to posterity amongst their memorabilia. If there 
w T as any body now qualified to draw a parallel be- 
tween the characters of Foote and Henderson, I 
don't pretend to say how the men of wit and hu- 
mour might divide the laurel between them, but in 
this all men would agree that poor Foote attached 



410 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

to himself very few true friends, and Henderson 
very many, and those highly respectable, men 
virtuous in their lives, and enlightened in their 
understandings. Foote, vain, extravagant, embar- 
rassed, led a wild and thoughtless course of life, 
yet when death approached him, he shrunk back 
into himself, saw and confessed his errors, and I 
have reason to believe was truly penitent. Hen- 
derson's conduct through life was uniformly de- 
corous, and in the concluding stage of it exemplarily 
devout." 

This is a high character, but I am willing to 
hope not an undeserved one. The reference to 
the last moments of Foote has probably some con- 
nection with his own efforts for his amendment : 
for I remember that Davies alludes, (with a sort of 
sneering scepticism, which does him little credit) 
to his endeavours. " Good Christians," says he, 
*' are not perhaps acquainted with the obligations 
they owe Mr. Cumberland. By the power of his 
eloquence, and the strength of his arguments he 
almost converted, some time before his death, that 
wicked unbeliever, Samuel Foote, to Christianity : 
he assured his friends, that if he had lived a little 
longer, he did not doubt but he should have com- 
pleted his work, and made a good man of him." 

There is a levity in this statement which ill be- 
comes the subject. If Foote needed conversion, 
if his belief required strengthening, and if Cum- 
berland really laboured to effect that conversion 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 41 1 

and to give that strength, let it be recorded among 
those actions of his life which most adorn and 
dignify his memory : but if the fact were other- 
wise, and assistance was neither required nor given, 
it would be no justification of the irreverence with 
which the allusion to a thing so solemn, as a 
preparation for eternity, is here treated. Surely 
his friend Johnson would have frowned upon such 
indecorous and insipid pertness had it come be- 
neath his notice. 



412 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

CHAP. XLX. 

Cum her land produces the M Y s t e r i o u s H u s b a n d , 
a tragedy. -^-The excellence of its plot. — Exami- 
nation of its characters. — Epilogue to the Arab. 
— Cumberland writes the Observer. — Compa- 
rison of this with the Essays of Johnson, Ad- 
dison, and STEKhE. — Exa?nination of some 
particular papers in this work. — Cumberland ar- 
gues against female acquirements. — The folly of 
this, and the absurdity of his exemplification. — 
His religious papers commended.— Cumberland* s 
notions of political liberty. -*— His character of 
Abraham Abrahams. — Anticipated in one of 
Itis papers by Mr. Pinkerton. — An instance of 
that icriters ineffable absurdity .—Cumberland* s 
mock criticism upon Othello defective. — Ge- 
neral character of the Observer.— Cumberland 
says that the style of it is "■ simple, clear, mnd 
harmonious!* — Examination of this claim.— In* 
stances cited to prove that his style has neither of 
these qualities. — The style of Goldsmith exa- 
mined and praised.-^The iniquitous proceedings 
of those who publish trials for adultery. — Some 
advice to the Society for the suppression 
of Vice. — An example how Cumberland* s style 
might be improved. — Examined with the greater 
rigour because of his gratuitous assumption of its 
superior merits. — His Observer that work which 
will most probably convey his name down to pos« 
terity. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 418 

The next dramatic production of Cumberland was 
the Mysterious Husband ', a tragedy, in which he 
also pourtrayed a character (Lord Davenant,) ex- 
pressly for the display of Henderson's peculiar 
powers, and he performed it, according to the au- 
thor's testimony, with conspicuous excellence. 

He who has been accustomed to associate with 
his ideas of tragedy a uniform pomp of diction and 
elevation of sentiment, will be disappointed when 
he takes up the Mysterious Husband, which is 
written in prose, and approaches, in some places, 
to the easy levity of comedy. The situations, 
however, are truly tragic, and the catastrophe is one 
as solemn and affecting as can well be devised. 

Of tragedies, founded upon domestic incidents, 
and composed without any stateliness of language, 
there were examples upon the English stage be- 
fore Cumberland produced this. Lillo had written 
his George Barnwell and Fatal Curiosity, and 
Moore had produced his Gamester, all of them 
devoid of these great and magnificent events, and 
of that laboured dignity of style, which had been 
supposed to belong as necessarily to tragedy as the 
divine right was once thought essential to regal 
dominion. 

Without staying to inquire whether as much 
might not be reasonably urged in defence of fami- 
liar tragedy as of sentimental comedy, I shall 
proceed to examine the one before me, and discri- 
minate its merits and defects. It partakes of both, 
but certainly more largely of the former. 



414* LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

The plot is contrived with exquisite felicity ; 
and though Cumberland has made it subservient 
to a drama which arrests the feelings in the most 
powerful mariner, I will not conceal my regret 
that it never fell into better hands. Had the ima- 
gination of Otway teemed with such a fiction, 
of what a tragedy might not the British stage now 
be possessed ? It is one so probably connected, so 
heart-rending, and so morally instructive, that I 
question if any play of modern times can be op- 
posed to it as superior. 

Great praise, indeed, is due to Cumberland. I 
know not whether he invented it, by a lucky 
effort of his own fancy, or whether he compounded 
its chief characteristics from the suggestions of 
other writers : but he has so skilfully supported it, 
involved it in so much pleasing intricacy, and, 
(what is very unusual in him) forborne its deve- 
lopement so thoroughly till the concluding scenes 
of the play, that he merits every commendation 
which such excellence can receive. 

The language of this drama is to be tried by the 
standard neither of tragedy nor comedy, for it be- 
longs to neither. I prefer it, however, to his dic- 
tion when he labours to construct it according to 
the received forms of tragic composition. It is 
animated, expressive, and occasionally elevated, 
but very seldom turgid, a fault which Cumber- 
land seems to have been incapable of avoiding 
when he strove to be dignified. Sometimes, in- 
deed, he lapses into unnatural tumor in the present 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 415' 

play, but beseems to have aimed rather at an even 
tenor of polished discourse, and has generally at- 
tained what he wished. 

The first interview between Captain Dormer 
and Lord Davenant is managed with great success. 
Nothing could be devised more calculated to 
heighten the infamy of Davenant, or to display the 
grateful and unsuspecting confidence of Dormer, 
than the propositions made by the latter respect- 
ing his sister. The same praise may be given to 
the interposition of Marianne, when Dormer and 
Sir Harry Harlow are fighting, by which the 
innocence of the latter is unequivocally esta- 
blished by an event apparently so accidental and 
yet natural. 

Of the characters, Lord Davenant* s is the most 
prominent. This was written by Cumberland for 
Henderson, and eminently he supported it. But 
he failed to give it what Henderson required, such 
a display of natural character as might secure it 
from contempt. Lord Davenant is a villain of so 
black a die, with a mind so lost to all elevated, 
generous, or tender sensations, that he excites 
nothing but unmingled abhorrence. His treatment 
of his wife is gloomily ferocious : there is no touch 
of pity in his disposition ; and the sullen apathy 
with which he dismisses the question of his son's 
promotion, proves that the father had as little do- 
minion in his heart as the husband. The atrocity 
of his conduct towards Marianne, has been too 
often equalled^ I am afraid, and without the in- 



416 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

fliction of such penalties as are produced in this 
tragedy. The seducer of female innocence tri- 
umphs in his guilt, while the deluded victim of 
his artifices is left to, pine in hopeless misery, an 
outcast from society, with no friend to admonish, 
no gentle hand to soothe the wounds which vil- 
lainy has given* and which the unfeeling cruelty 
of a sordid policy aggravates and inflames. 

The next character which excites attention is 
Lady Davenant, She of course is contrasted with 
her husband ; and meekness, forbearance, and vir- 
tue, are given to her, that they may the more 
glaringly exhibit the arrogance, resentment, and 
vice of her husband. She is, however, made a 
very interesting personage. The dignity of her 
sentiments, the nobleness of her nature, and the 
generous loftiness of her behaviour towards the 
tyrant who had wedded her, command, and pre- 
serve the admiration and applause of the reader. — 
This admiration and applause she forfeits only 
once, and that is when she incautiously admits her 
former lover to embrace and caress her. Had Cum- 
berland duly considered the character which he 
gave Lady Davenant to support, he would have 
forborne to place her in a situation quite derogatory 
from what she is obviously intended to appear. 

I do not, however, accord in opinion with Cum- 
berland, that " Lady Davenant is the best female 
part he ever tendered to the stage/' That praise, 
perhaps, belongs rather to the character of 
Lady Paragon, in the Natural Son, the peculiar 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 417 

merits of which I shall discuss when I examine 
that play. 

Little applause can be given to any other of the 
characters in this tragedy. Charles Davenant is 
merely a gentleman ; Captain Dormer has some 
qualities about him which interest, but they are 
not adequately developed. Sir Harry Harlow is too 
flippant for tragedy; and yet he has not sufficient 
vivacity for comedy. He is a dramatic abortion. 

But worse than an abortion is the character of 
Sir Edmund Travers ; nor can I conceive for what 
purpose the author introduced him. He neither 
accelerates nor retards the progress of the action. 
He is disgustingly odious. His meanness is with- 
out humour to make it ridiculous, and his fatuity 
without virtue to make it respectable. His per- 
tinacious belief of his niece's happiness against 
every outward appearance is mere folly : yet it is 
a folly in which Cumberland seems to have de- 
lighted, for he has made a similar exhibition of it 
in his comedy of First Love. 

Cumberland wrote one more part for Hender- 
son, and that was the character of the Arab in the 
play of that name. It was acted only once, for his 
benefit, and was never published. The epilogue 
to it has been thought worthy of preservation by 
the author, and, as it is short, may be transcribed 
here. It was spoken by Miss Young. 

Yes, 'tis as I predicted — there you sit 

Expecting some smart relishes of -wit. 

Why, 'tis a delicacy out of season — 

Sirs, have some conscience — ladies, hear some reason ! 

2E 



41S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

With your accustom'd grace you come to share 

Your humble actor's annual bill of fare : 

But for wit, take it how you will, I tell you, 

All have not Falstaff 's brains that have his belly ! 

Wit is not all men's money : when you've bought it 

Look at your lot— you're trick' d— who could have thought it ? 

Read it, 'tis folly : court it, a coquette : 

Wed it, a libertine — you're fairly met. 

No sex, age, country, character, nor clime, 

No rank commands it : it obeys no time : 

Fear'd, lov'd, and hated ; prais'd, ador'd, and curs'd j 

The very best of all things, and the worst : 

From this extreme to that for ever hurl'd, 

The idol and the outlaw of the world. 

In France, Spain, England, Italy, and Greece, 

The joy, plague, pride, and foot-ball of caprice. 

Is it in that man's face, who looks so wise, 
With lips half-open'd, and with half-shut eyes ? 
Silent grimace ! Flows it from this man's tongue, 
With quaint conceits and punning quibbles hung ? 
A nauseous counterfeit I Hark '. now I hear it- 
Rank infidelity ! I cannot bear it. 
See where her tea-table Vanessa spreads ! 
A motley groupe of heterogeneous heads 
Gathers around : the goddess in a cloud 
Of incense sits amidst the adoring crowd, 
So many smiles, nods, whispers, she dispenses, 
Instead of five, you'd think she'd fifteen senses j 
Alike impatient all at once to shine, 
Eager they plunge in wit's unfathom'd mine ; 
Deep underneath the stubborn ore remains 
The paltry tin breaks up, and mocks their pains. 

Ask wit of me ! Oh, monstrous ! I declare, 
You might as well ask it of my Lord Mayor : 
Require it in an Epilogue ! a road 
As track'd and trodden as a birth-day ode ; 
Oh '. rather turn to those malicious elves, 
Who see it in no mortal but themselves ; 
Our gratitude is all we have to give, 
And what we trust your candour will receive. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 419 

There is some vivacity in these lines, but they 
•are inferior to what Cumberland probably thought 
them by his admitting them into the pages of his 
Memoirs. The play to which they belonged was 
the last office of friendship he had any opportu- 
nity of performing towards Henderson, who died 
soon after in the full vigour of his talents and the 
meridian of his fame. 

It was during his abode at Tunbridge Wells that 
Gumberland gradually composed and progres- 
sively published his Observer, a body of Essays 
which, though it will never rank his name upon an 
equality with Steele, Addison, and Johnson, con- 
fers upon him a fair title to take his station by 
the side of Colman, Lloyd, Cambridge, Moore, 
Hawkes worth, and Chesterfield. These papers 
were not published as those of his predecessors 
were, in daily or weekly numbers, but in volumes 
successively brought forth as a sufficient number 
of Essays had accumulated to form them. They 
have lately been incorporated into a complete edi- 
tion of the British Essayists, and may therefore, 
as Cumberland justly observes, be regarded " as 
fairly enrolled amongst the standard classics of our 
native language." 

Johnson produced his Ramblers with very little 
assistance from contemporary wits ; but Cumber- 
land wrote his Observer without any. The dif- 
ferent powers of the two writers, however, may 
be easily ascertained from a very slight inspection 

2 E2 



4 C 20 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

of their topics. Johnson drew solely from the 
stores of his own mind. His imagination quick- 
ened into perpetual growth objects of discussion ; 
he seized upon an ordinary subject, and by the 
energy of his language, the richness of his fancy, 
the fertility of his allusions, and, above all, by the 
deep insight into human nature which he pos- 
sessed, he so decorated and enforced it, that had 
novelty lent her aid, she could scarcely have added 
another attraction. He derived little help from 
books, and seldom extended his essays by quota- 
tion. They were short also, and it did not often 
happen that the topic was pursued through suc- 
cessive numbers, for the quickness of his inven- 
tion was such that he seldom needed to protract a 
disquisition by a languid iteration of ideas. His 
Rambler consists of two hundred and eight, papers, 
and he discharges all the favours he received by 
the acknowledgement of six out of this number. 

Cumberland's Observer contains as great, if not 
a greater, quantity of matter, and it comprises 
only one hundred and fifty-two papers. Of these, 
more than one-third is compiled from other books. 
They consist of critical researches into ancient 
writers, accompanied with copious extracts ; of 
brief accounts of philosophers and poets derived 
from sources familiar to the learned ; and of his- 
torical relations which require little other labour 
than that of writing down the facts retained in the 
memory. Those papers which are original are 
expanded into unusual copiousness, and are some- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 421 

times pursued through several successive essays. 
They were written too at distant intervals of 
time, while Johnson's were produced by the ne- 
cessity of stated and periodical labour within the 
space of two years. 

From this comparison (honourable indeed to 
Cumberland, for with him alone can it be made, 
all our other essayists having been associated to- 
gether in their respective labours,) two conclusions 
may be inferred ; one, that Johnson possessed an 
extraordinary rapidity of conception, accompanied 
with a rapidity of execution as extraordinary : the 
other, that Cumberland, though he had, perhaps, no 
less rapidity of execution than Johnson, was far 
beneath him in that intellectual fruitfulness by 
which topics are not only elicited but afterwards 
pursued, and embellished with all the brightest 
ornaments of fancy, or enforced with all the weigh- 
tiest arguments of reason. 

The most conspicuous part of these papers, and 
that which Cumberland seems to have regarded as 
his happiest effort, is the inquiry instituted into 
the history of the Greek writers, particularly of the 
comic poets now lost. " I am vain enough," says 
he, " to believe no such collection of the scattered 
extracts, anecdotes, and remains of those drama- 
tists is any where else to be found ;" and in an- 
other part of his Memoirs, he quotes, with mani- 
fest exultation, the following panegyric from the 
pen of Mr. Walpole, of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. 



422 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

66 Aliunde quoque hand exiguum ornamentum 
huic volumini accessit, siquidem Cumberlandius 
nostras amice benevoleque permisit, ut versiones 
suas quorundam fragmentorum, exquisitas sane 
illaS) mint que elegantid conditas et commendatas 
hue transfer rem." 

In writing these erudite papers, he was greatly 
assisted by the marginal annotations upon the au- 
thors by his grandfather Bentley, some of whose 
books he received from his uncle (Dr. Richard 
Bentley) and among them many of the writers 
whose works he afterwards illustrated in the Ob- 
server. That these essays, indeed, deserve every 
praise which so much diligence, learning, and 
skilful criticism can obtain, I will not deny ; but 
they will oftener be commended than read. 

It is deemed unlucky to stumble on the thresh- 
hold, but Cumberland has done so. I do not be- 
lieve, indeed, that it would be-possible to produce, 
from any writer of the last century, a paragraph so 
feebly involved as that with which the first num- 
ber of the Observer commences. The reader 
wanders through it as in a maze ; he finds himself 
at the end, at last, but wonders how he came 
there; he attempts to look back and disentangle 
the path he pursued, and beholds only inextrica- 
ble confusion. I know nothing that resembles 
this initial paragraph, except it be some of the 
prolixly concatenated sentences of Gauden ; but 
his involutions are amply redeemed by a richness 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 423 

of imagination which scatters the brightest flowers 
over the palpable confusion. 

The purport of his undertaking was, as he in- 
forms us, " to tell his readers what he had ob- 
served of men and books in the most amusing 
manner he was able." This, indeed, was an un- 
ambitious claim, and to which I think he esta- 
blished a sufficient right in the progress of his 
labours. 

Before delivering a general opinion upon this 
work, I wish to make some desultory observations 
upon particular passages, and in which I shall 
hope to consult the reader's pleasure and advan- 
tage. 

Cumberland knew and had felt the advantages 
of being educated by a mother of more than ordi- 
nary literature ; and it may therefore justly excite 
our wonder to find him ridiculing the possession, 
as well as the affectation, of knowledge in a female. 
Numbers five, six, and seven, are devoted to this 
purpose, and with as much success as the under- 
taking deserved. In Calliope it is the abuse of 
reading and intellectual pleasures which is exhi- 
bited, though the author's intention was evidently 
to render odious every female acquirement which 
aspired beyond those of domestic utility. 

I have already animadverted, in the forty-first 
page of this work, upon that narrow policy which 
would exclude, from the fair regions of knowledge, 
one half of the rational creation, by reducing it to 



424 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

such abject insignificance, that nothing but the 
instinctive appetites of the other half could rescue 
it from merited contempt and ignominy. By 
what fatality it is that men, who know the enjoy- 
ments of intellect, who know how much our 
moral nature is refined by the refinement of our 
minds, and who know, also, that mental superi- 
ority is the final scale of admeasurement by which 
all human excellence is adjusted, should be found 
so willing to depreciate that quality in the female 
sex which they so justly vaunt in themselves, I 
am unable to conjecture. Perhaps, indeed, it is 
the jealousy of dominion that influences them; 
and like some modern statesmen, who argue that 
men, to be governed, should be kept in salutary 
ignorance, they think they could not act the 
tyrant's part so easily as they now do, if their vic- 
tims, with increased knowledge, had an increased 
consciousness of their own rights and privileges. 
From some such debased maxim they probably 
act, and the consequence is, that they are the first 
and most lamentable objects of their own oppres- 
sion ; upon them it recoils with that certainty of 
evil which it were well for mankind if every op- 
pression produced upon its author. 

It may justly provoke our indignation, however* 
to see Cumberland, who owed so much to the 
early tuition of a mother, distinguished above her 
sex by her intellectual attainments, and without 
which attainments her son must have wanted 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 425 

those benefits he so feelingly commemorates in 
his Memoirs, striving, though ineffectually, to 
deride all intellectual pre-eminence in woman. 
His father was a bishop. Should we not feel 
something more than wonder if he had endea- 
voured, in any part of his writings, to traduce the 
dignities of the church, by exhibiting an episcopal 
coxcomb, and making the possession of a mitre 
the impediment to future kindness? Yet, what does 
he better, than tacitly traduce the acquirements of 
his mother, when he introduces a female pedant, 
with the intention to ridicule all learning in women, 
and exhibits her as forfeiting the hand of an intended 
husband, unless she burns her books, and engages 
never to quote a line of poetry while she lives 1 

The letter from this enlightened lover, where 
he disclaims his mistress because she reads, is 
written with a coarseness of argument which does 
not much assist the cause of ignorance. " No, 
no," he exclaims, in one part, " heaven defend 
me from a learned wife V' and in another he asks, 
" For God's sake what have women to do with 
learning ?." 

I will not waste my own and my reader's time, 
however, by combating such compendious argu« 
ments as these ; but I will dismiss the subject 
with recounting the particulars of the lady's refor- 
mation. Finding she must either forego her hus- 
band or her books, she is made to renounce the 
latter, and after she is married, she gives the follow- 



426 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

ing proof of her complete recantation of the dread- 
ful heresy into which she had fallen. It is the 
concluding paragraph of a supposed letter from 
her to the Observer : 

" I had almost forgot to mention to you a cir- 
cumstance," says she, " that passed as we were 
sitting at table after dinner, and by which our 
good friend, the vicar, undesignedly threw me into 
confusion that was exceedingly distressing, by re- 
peating some verses from Pope's Essay on Man, 
in which he applied to me to help him out in 
his quotation ; I certainly remembered the pas- 
sage, and could have supplied his memory with 
the words ; but Henry being present, and the 
recollection of what had passed on the subject of 
poetry, rushing on my mind, at the same time 
that I thought I saw him glance a significant look 
at me, threw me into such embarrassment on 
the sudden, that in vain endeavouring to evade the 
subject, and being pressed a little unseasonably by 
the vicar, my spirits also being greatly fluttered by 
the events of the morning, I could no longer com- 
mand myself, but burst into tears, and very nar- 
rowly escaped falling into a second hysteric. No- 
thing ever equalled the tenderness of Henry on 
this occasion ; nay, I thought I could discover 
that he was secretly pleased with the event, as it 
betrayed a consciousness of former vanities, and 
seemed to prove that I repented of them ; what- 
ever interpretation he might put upon it, still I 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 427 

could not bring myself to repeat the verses ; and I 
believe I shall never utter another couplet whilst 
1 live." 

With this extract I may safely abandon the sub- 
ject. Nothing that I can say could render it more 
contemptible, for absurdity is carried beyond all 
power of exaggeration. Surely such dreadful con- 
sequences never before followed from the bare 
thoughts of reciting a few lines of poetry. 

Let the weight of this censure, however, be 
counterbalanced by a praise much higher than 
could have been bestowed upon the best exertions 
of Cumberland in defence of female learning. His 
papers on Christianity shew that he was sincerely 
impressed with those great truths which he la- 
bours, and not unsuccessfully, to support and 
illustrate. He does not, indeed, penetrate into 
the obscurities of the solemn question, nor does 
he dazzle by a subtlety of argument which more 
frequently belongs to the pride of thinking acutely 
than to the wish of thinking well ; but he reasons 
solrdly and perspicuously upon some of the most 
important parts of the divine dispensation, and en- 
deavours to fix the belief of his readers in funda- 
mental truths, by such arguments as nothing but 
determined scepticism can reject. I have been 
very deeply gratified in reading these papers, and 
I am happy in having this opportunity of testifying 
my gratification. Could I hope also, that my re- 
commendation would have any weight, I would 



'128 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

earnestly persuade every one to peruse them who 
requires either to have his doubts satisfied, or his 
faith quickened by the satisfaction of his reason. 

Cumberland, indeed, like Johnson, has every 
right to be regarded as a Christian moralist. He 
missed no incidental occasion, in any of his writ- 
ings, to uphold •the interests of religion, and he 
employed his pen specifically for the same purpose. 
Besides the papers to which I have just alluded, 
he produced his pamphlet entitled " A few plain 
reasons why we should believe in Christ, and ad- 
here to his religion " he wrote also many sermons 
which were preached, and he sometimes employed 
his leisure hours in versifying the psalms. These 
things should be remembered, and remembered to 
his honour. 

I know not what were Cumberland's notions of 
political liberty ; he seems, indeed, to have had 
none that were very precise. In No. 21, of the 
Observer, he regards as " one of the greatest evils 
of the time, ,> and " as replete with foreign and 
domestic mischief," the right of publishing parlia- 
mentary debates. And why does he think so r 
Because " our orators speak pamphlets, and the 
senate is turned into a theatre/* An admirable 
reason it must be confessed. If, however, he had 
duly reflected upon the nature of the English con- 
stitution, and upon that reciprocity of understanding 
which ought to exist between the people and their 
representatives, he would have perceived that no 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 429 

mode could be devised better calculated to secure 
that end, than the publicity of parliamentary pro- 
ceedings. The nation delegates a trust, a most 
important trust ; and shall it not know how that 
trust has been exercised ? The principles and 
conduct of a member are now examined and un- 
derstood by every man in the kingdom ; and when, 
by a dissolution of the parliament, he is sent back 
to his constituents, they have the power of with- 
holding their votes if he has betrayed their interest, 
and of electing another in whose integrity they 
can better confide. 

But this could seldom be done, if there were no 
direct channel by which the course of his proceed- 
ings might be manifested. They could act only 
from vague reports, and would always be liable to 
act with injustice. What is the consequence also 
of this public scrutiny which is thus exercised 
over every member of parliament ? That which 
must ever be productive of the greatest welfare to 
the nation. The members discharge their high 
office with that consciousness of being watched, 
which often makes a man honest in practice whose 
principles are dishonest. If he have any ambition 
to retain his station, if he glory in the rank it con- 
fers upon him, and fear to lose it, he will act with 
that circumspection, with that effective integrity, 
(knowing that he acts in the observance of his 
constituents), which, by testifying his value and 
fitness, may secure to him a continuance of his 



430 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

post. All this he will be more likely to do, while 
the proceedings of parliament are open to the in- 
spection of the country, than if they were hidden 
from it. Let us not believe that every man has 
that stubborn fidelity of soul which can resist all 
the attacks of temptation, disguised under the 
seducing forms of titles, influence, and wealth, or 
that he will retire uncorrupted from a contest, with 
no other compensation than the gratulations of an 
approving conscience. 

Cumberkind^ perhaps, wished that the members 
of parliament should enjoy the same political im- 
munity, the same freedom from controul, the same 
security from reproach and ridicule, which he 
would willingly have claimed for the members of 
Parnassus, and especially for himself; but, in my 
opinion, whenever the day comes that the British 
legislature deliberates with closed doors, that day 
will be the signal for the extinction of British li- 
berty. The great moral engine of public opinion, 
that tribunal to which every public man should 
be amenable, will be destroyed, and on its ruins 
will be erected a mysterious tyranny, which will 
bow down the necks of my countrymen to the 
dust, without, perhaps, perpetrating any overt act 
of despotism, flagrant enough to rouse them to 
resistance. The most dangerous, indeed, of all 
attacks on freedom, are those which imperceptibly 
sap its foundations; where nothing is seen to fall 
till the last support is silently undermined, and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 431 

the whole fabric rushes to instantaneous destruc- 
tion. 

Among the narrations which are included in 
this work, that of Melissa (Nos. 23 and 24), may 
be distinguished. It is well written, and contains 
some natural display of character ; but many parts 
of it seem to have been suggested by Moliere's 
Precieuses Ridicules. 

How easy it is to deliver maxims of prudence, 
but how difficult, sometimes, to adopt them. It 
is amusing, indeed, to observe with what philoso- 
phical apathy, Cumberland councils the actors 
(in No. 29) 5 to endure the attacks incident to their 
profession, while we remember with how little 
apathy he bore the attacks incident to his own. 
The whole paper may be pronounced a severe com- 
ment upon his own practice. Why did not he use 
that dignified forbearance which he so vehemently 
recommends ? Why did not he practise that 
principle which he quotes from Tacitus in these 
words : Spreta exolescunt si irascare^ agnita viden- 
tur? and why did he not adopt the judicious ob- 
servation of Addison, as the rule of his own con- 
duct ? The cause may be found in the well known 
replication of the Grecian sage, who, when asked 
what was the easiest thing to do, answered, " To 
give advice' 9 

In conformity with that benevolence of princi- 
ple which led Cumberland to cast a radiance 
round the dramatic characters of an Irishman and 
a Scotchman, he has endeavoured, in the Ob- 



432 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

server, to exalt the depressed and persecuted Jews, 
though he once (as I have instanced) concurred to 
support the degradation in which they were sunk. 
To this object he devotes nine papers, and in the 
character of Abraham Abrahams, has exhibited 
an individual endowed with the most amiable and 
attractive qualities. I willingly hope that they 
are not imaginary ; but the conclusion of the 
following paragraph from his Memoirs, seems to 
imply that Cumberland found them less deserv- 
ing of his philanthropy than he had fancied them 
to be. 

" I take credit to myself/' says he " for 
the character of Abraham Abrahams-, I wrote 
it upon principle, thinking it high time that 
something should be done for a persecuted 
race. I seconded my appeal to the charity of 
mankind by the character of Sheva, which I co- 
pied from this of Abrahams. The public prints 
gave the Jews credit for their sensibility, in ac- 
knowledging my well-intended services ; my 
friends gave me joy of honorary presents, and 
some even accused me of ingratitude for not mak- 
ing public my thanks of their munificence. I will 
speak plainly on this point ; I do most heartily 
wish they had flattered me with some token, how- 
ever small, of which I might have said, this is a 
tribute to my philanthropy, and delivered it down 
to my children, as my beloved father did to me 
his badge of favour from the citizens of Dublin ; 
but not a word from the lips, not a line did I 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 433 

ever receive from the pen of any Jew, though 
I have found myself in company, with many of 
their nation ; and in this, perhaps, the gentlemen 
are quite right, whilst I had formed expectations 
that were quite wrong; for if I have said for them 
only what they deserve, why should I be thanked 
for it ? But if I said more, much more, than they 
deserve, can they do a wiser thing than hold their 
tongues ?" 

There is at least as much asperity as candour in 
the conclusion of this paragraph, and Cumberland 
evidently thought the Jews were bound, by com- 
mon gratitude, to reward their voluntary champion. 
In No. 50, there is an attempt to illustrate 
the modern mode of theatrical criticism, by an 
imaginary inquiry into the tragedy of Othello, sup- 
posed to be written the day after its first perform- 
ance. The idea is ingenious, but the merit of 
invention does not belong to Cumberland ; at least, 
a similar conception occurred to another writer, 
aud was reduced to practice some years before the 
appearance of his Observer. 

This writer was Mr. Pinkerton, who published 
some verses in 1782, called " Rimes/' and which 
he believed to be poetry. The critics thought 
otherwise, however, and told him so ; but he was 
as little qualified to remain tranquil beneath the 
lash as Cumberland could be. By some accident, 
the volume arrived at a second edition, and Mr. 
Pinkerton appeared armed for encounter with his 

9F 



434 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

opponents. In his advertisement he calls them 
all dunces, but makes no attempt to prove them 
so ; he utters the filthiest abuse, and deems it hu- 
mour; he dwells with the most offensive egotism 
upon his own praises, and calls it a vindication of 
himself. He does more also. To shame his ene- 
mies, and to convince mankind that they are a race 
of hopeless blockheads, he gives a translation from 
a presumed Greek MS. " reposited in a leaden 
box, and found in an ancient dunghill," which 
proves to be a critique upon the first Pythian ode 
of Pindar, and is written with as much vulgarity 
and silliness as Mr. Pinkerton could devise; this 
was to assure the world that modern critics 
wrote with vulgarity and silliness; he supposes, 
also, another critique to have been found (in the 
ruins of Herculaneum, and forming the cover to 
a pie), upon some of Horace's odes written just 
after their production, and distinguished only 
for feeble malice and abortive wit; nay, he 
makes a third discovery, of some critical remarks 
upon Dryden's ode, which surpass, in all that 
is despicable and insignificant, either of the pre- 
ceding artificial antiquities. If the reader will for- 
give me for polluting my pages with such ineffable 
nonsense, he may be satisfied of what I say by 
reading the following paragraphs, which comprise 
the whole of this bastard progeny of resentment 
and dullness. It is supposed to be copied from 
a MS. dated May 16, 1701. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 435 

u Cryticall Remarques upon Mr. Dry den s Odd 
called Alexandre 1 s Feast. By Burneby Barman, 
Clarke off" the Parishe of Cammerwell, A.M. A.S.S. 

" Abracadabra. De profundis clamavi. Poete 
nascitur non Jit. Orator Jit non nascitur. Quae 
masculis tribuuntur mascula sunto (copied from 
bookes, so am share they are richt spelt J. I quot 
these verses of the Greeke poette, Curteous Reder, to 
shew thee thet I ame not unquallifyed for the tasque 
I have taken in hande, but on the contrarie am em- 
bued with pulite leaminge. 

" This poeme beginneth thus : c Twas at the royal 
feste, 6fc. 9 Hon wulgar is this! It resembleth a 
drinking songe. The author seemeth not to knotve 
the difference betwixt an Odd and a Songe, which 
is as followethe, viz. A long Odd is a short Songe, 
ty a long Songe is a short Odd. Now an Odd should 
never be in a common stoile, but as we say in an odd 
stoile. Q. E. D. 

" That lyne, ' so should desert in arms be 
crowned, 9 is off verie bad example. If desertors be 
crowned, trew sou Idlers must be whipt in their place. 
So what is sauce for a guse is sauce for a gaunder. 

" Happy, happy, happy paire, might have been 
spaired thus, Happy 3 pair, which icould have saved 
wry ting the word happy thryce over. Qu. If it 
should not be nappy ? 

" • Timotheus placed on high, 9 read perched 
on high. For l flying fingers,' we ought surely to 
rede ' frying fingers. 9 Annie Jly in g Jin gers I never 

9 F 2 



436 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

chaunced to see; Frying fingers are common in 
flaying on a wind instrument such as the ancient 
harpe was. 

" ' A dragon s Fiery form belyed the God* If 
a dragon gave a God the lye he ocht to have hadde 
his nose pulled, fiery as he ivas. 

" In the IV handsaw we reade of slaying the 
slain thrice, a thing in my judgment not altogether 
posibil. We likewise rede the word * fallen five 
times over. An egregious absurditie! For if a man 
is once fallen he cannot fall again till he has got 
on his legges. Now legges are not once mentioned. 

" In No. VI. we meet with ghosts, fJesu protect 
mee,for as I lyve 1 saw a ghost last nyght at Peter 
Haynes s harne door), 6 that in battle were slayne! 
A ghost slayne! O heaven, what nonsense! The 
conclusion is mighty pretiie. But upon the whole, 
this piece is not equal to anie of the noble produc- 
tions of a Mr. Thomas Dur fey . Amen." 

If the reader's disgust do not overpower his be- 
nevolence he will perhaps smile at this harmless 
and inefficient nonsense: but nothing else can save 
it from utter contempt. Many who are acquainted 
with Mr. Pinkerton's present respectability in 
literature, may be surprised that he was ever ca- 
pable of writing any thing so absurd ; the book 
which contains it is deservedly scarce, and I am 
willing to believe, therefore, that as a curiosity, my 
insertion of it in these pages will be forgiven. 
It is evident, however, that when Cumberland 






LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 4-37 

employeda similar mode of ridiculing the illiberality 
of modern critics, he had either adopted it from Mr. 
Pinkerton, or fallen into an accidental coincidence 
of idea with him. Which was the case is not 
worth inquiring : for though he has succeeded 
better than his predecessor, he has left much to be 
done by any ingenious follower. 

The true mode, as it seems to me, in which this 
topic might be humorously enforced, would be to 
select any composition of acknowledged general 
merit, but containing some real deficiencies ; to 
specify these deficiencies only, without adverting 
to the superior passages; to dwell upon them with 
every aggravation of ridicule and severky ; to ex- 
hibit them as the character of the whole production, 
and from them to pronounce a general opinion of 
the work itself. This would be an accurate picture 
of the common process of contemporary periodical 
criticism: but instead of this Cumberland has ani- 
madverted upon those things which are not faulty, 
and on which censure is bestowed therefore with 
manifest injustice. 

As I have not scrupled to quote from Mr. Pin- 
kerton, it will be but justice to Cumberland that 
his treatment of a similar subject should be opposed 
to that writer's: 

" Let us suppose/' says he, " for a moment, 
that Shakspeare was now an untried poet, and 
opened his career with any one of his best plays ; 



438 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

the next morning ushers into the world the fol- 
lowing, or something like the following critique. 

" ' Last night was presented, for the first time, 
a tragedy called Othello ^ or the Moor of Venice, 
avowedly the production of Mr. William Shak- 
speare the actor. This gentleman's reputation in 
his profession is of the mediocre sort, and we pre- 
dict that his present tragedy will not add much to 
it in any way. Mediocribus esse poetis, the reader 
can supply the rest, — verb. sap. As we profess 
ourselves to be friendly to the players in general, 
we shall reserve our fuller critique of this piece, 
till after its third night ; for we hold it very stuff of 
the conscience, (to use Mr. Shakspeare's own words) 
not to war against the poet's muse : though we 
might apply the author's quaint conceit to him- 
self— 

* Who steals his purse, steals trash : 'tis something ; nothing.' 

" 6 In this last reply we agree with Mr. Shak- 
speare that 'tis nothing, and our philosophy tells 
us ex nihilo, nihil Jit. 

" c For the plot of this tragedy the most we can 
say is, that it is certainly of the moving sort, for it 
is here and there and every where ; a kind of the- 
atrical hocus pocus; a creature of the pye-ball 
breed, like Jacob's muttons, between a black ram 
and a white ewe. It brought to our mind the 
children's game of I love my love with an A — with 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 439 

this difference only, that the young lady in this 
play loves her love with a B — because he is black. 
— Risum teneatis? 

" 6 There is one Iago, a bloody-minded fellow, 
who stabs men in the dark behind their backs ; 
now this is a thing we hold to be most vile and 
ever to be abhorred. Othello smothers his white 
wife in bed ; our readers may think this a shabby 
kind of an action for a general of his high calling ; 
but we beg leave to observe that it shews some 
spirit at least in Othello to attack the enemy in her 
strong quarters at once. There was an incident of 
a pocket handkerchief, which Othello called out 
for most lustily, and we were rather sorry that his 
lady could not produce it, as we might then have 
seen one handkerchief at least employed in the 
tragedy. There was some vernacular phrases, 
which caught our ear, such as where the black 
damns his wife twice in a breath — Oh damn her — 
damn her ! which we thought savoured more of 
the language spoken at the door than within the 
doors of the theatre : but when we recollect that 
the author used to amuse a leisure hour with 
calling up gentlemen's coaches after the play was 
over, before he was promoted to take a part in it, 
we could readily account for old habits. Though 
we have seen many gentlemen and ladies kill them- 
selves on the stage, yet we must give the author 
credit for the new way in which his hero puts 
himself out of the world : Othello having smothered 



440 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

his wife, and being taken up by the officers of the 
state, prepares to despatch himself and escape from 
the hands of justice ; to bring this about he begins 
a story about his killing a man in Aleppo, which he 
illustrates, par example, by stabbing himself, and so 
winds up his story and his life in the same mo- 
ment. The author made his appearance in the 
person of one Brabantio, an old man, who makes 
his first entry from a window ; this occasioned 
some risibility in the audience: the part is of 
art inferior kind, and Mr. Shakspeare was 
more indebted to the exertions of his brethren, 
than to his own, for carrying the play through. 
Upon the whole we do not think the passion of 
jealousy : on which the plot turns, so proper for 
tragedy as comedy, and we would recommend to 
the author, if his piece survives its nine nights, to 
cut it down to a farce, and serve it up to the 
public, mic cumd salts, in that shape. After this 
specimen of Mr. William Shakspeare's tragic 
powers, we cannot encourage him to pursue his 
attempts upon Melpomene; for there is a good 
old proverb which we would advise him to bear in 
mind — ne suior ultra crepidam. If he applies to 
his friend Ben, he will turn it into English for 
him/ ".. 

Though this as far surpasses Mr. Pinkerton's 
wit and humour, as Mr. Pinkerton surpasses most 
m< n in the power of patient and laborious appli- 
cation, it is yet very inferior to what may be done. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 411 

We have no just exhibition in it of what is really the 
practice of modern criticism, for no newspaper 
writer would discuss the merits of such a tragedy 
as Othello (supposing it to be now first produced), 
in this manner. But Cumberland remembered 
what had been said of his tragedies, and in the 
tumult of resentment forgot that he was not a 
Shakspeare. 

Some of the incidental narratives in the Observer 
are pleasingly written ; and Cumberland was ac- 
cused of having taken many of them from Spanish 
authors. The charge, however, he solemnly de- 
nies, and asserts his entire and undiminished claim 
to every thing in the volumes which is not an 
avowed quotation. 

If the Observer be considered as a body of 
Essays, upon life, upon manners, and upon litera- 
ture, it will shrink in comparison with those pro- 
duced by Steele, by Addison, and by Johnson. 
Cumberland was capable of imagining characters ; 
but he does not seem to have had much power of 
observing those qualities in individuals of which 
character is compounded. That which was ob- 
trusively visible in a man, he could seize and pour- 
tray ; but the less obvious modes of thought, the 
secret bias, the prevailing but obscure motives to 
conduct, were seldom within his reach. He could 
invent, and give the invention an air of reality : 
upon a slender basis of truth he could engraft an 
agreeable fiction, in which, however, the traces 



442 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

of fancy would still be so discernible that the 
reader never mistook them. 

In this respect, therefore, he was greatly inferior 
to either Steele, Addison, or Johnson. They had 
a quick perception of the follies of mankind, and 
exhibited, without exaggeration, such a picture 
of them as none could mistake, and none could 
view without conviction of its truth. They looked 
abroad upon life, and observed all its various com- 
binations : they studied man and knew the arti- 
fices by which his conduct was obscured. They 
penetrated through that veil which necessity some- 
times, and custom always, impels us to throw round 
our actions, and they disclosed those hidden qua- 
lities which escape the notice of ordinary observa- 
tion, but which are recognised with instantaneous 
acquiescence When displayed. 

The want of this power in Cumberland is greatly 
felt by him who reads his essays consecutively ; 
for, being restricted in the limits of his excursions, 
by inability to avail himself of what wider research 
would have offered, he is too diffuse upon single 
incidents and characters, as a man who has not 
many guineas applies one to its utmost variety of 
purposes. 

In his literary disquisitions, though always in- 
ferior to Johnson as a critic, he is often very 
pleasing and often equal to Addison. His learn- 
ing, perhaps, sometimes degenerates into pedantry, 
but he who is rich is apt to display his wealth. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 443 

His critical papers are among the most amusing, 
and he has instituted an ingenious comparison be- 
tween Massinger's Fatal Dowry and Rowe's Fair 
Penitent, in which the brief opinions of Mr. M. 
Mason (Massinger's editor) are enforced by ex- 
amples pertinently selected. I wish, however, that 
his admiration of Cowper had not excited him to 
an imitation of that nervous and original writer. 

In his characters he sometimes exhibited living 
individuals. I have already alluded to his in- 
troduction of Johnson ; and in the same number, 
I imagine his actress to be Mrs. Siddons. Gorgon, 
the self-conceited painter of the deformed and 
terrible, (No. 93), was probably meant for Fuseli : 
but if so, there is more willingness to wound than 
power. 

There is nothing in these papers by which the 
most delicate reader can be displeased, which is a 
praise that cannot be wholly given either to the 
Spectator or Guardian, whose zeal to reform cer- 
tain exposures of the female person often led them 
to illustrations not exactly within the limits of 
decency. This commendation I bestow the more 
willingly upon Cumberland, because the practice 
of such decorum was not habitual in him, for in 
some of his writings he only needed to employ a 
corresponding licentiousness of expression to rank 
with the corrupters of public morals. 

I regret that he has asserted his claim to purity 
of style, with so much confidence as the following 



444 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

sentence implies. " If my critics," says he, " be 
not too candid I am encouraged to believe, that in 
these volumes of Henry and in those of the Ob- 
server^ I have succeeded in what I laboured to 
effect with all my care, a simple, clear, harmonious 
style; which, taken as a model, may be followed 
without leading the noviciate either into turgidity 
or obscurity, holding a middle tone of period, nei- 
ther swelling into high flown metaphor, nor sinking 
into inelegant and unclassical rusticity. Whether 
or not I have succeeded, 1 certainly have at- 
tempted to reform and purify my native language 
from certain false pedantic pre valencies, which 
were much in fashion when I first became a writer: 
I dare not say with those, whose flattery might 
mislead me, that I have accomplished what I aimed 
at, but if I have done something towards it, I may 
say with Pliny, — " Posteris an aliqua cur a nostri, 
nescio. Nos certe meremur ut sit aliqua; non dicam 
ingenio; id enim superbum; sed studio, sed labore, 
sed r ever entia poster orum" 

The secret consciousness of success is concealed 
with too little artifice in this passage. He affects 
to doubt, what he strongly believed, and his modest 
humility is no other than a gentle invitation to the 
world to force upon him the truth which he seems 
to question with so much simplicity and candour. 
I confess I should have preferred an open and un- 
equivocal declaration of what I think his real senti- 
ments were, to this prudish coquetry, this coy 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 445 

frisking about thesubject,like a young girl who pro- 
tests that nobody shall kiss her, and struggles against 
the attempt only that it may be urged with greater 
briskness. The obvious import of the paragraph 
is this ; that Cumberland reformed our style, by 
writing, himself, in a " simple, clear, and harmo- 



nious" manner, 



But, I have already observed, that in aim- 
ing at simplicity and ease, he too commonly fell 
into meanness and imbecility : and as he has chosen 
to refer to the Observer as the criterion of his own 
assumption, from the Observer I will select the 
proofs of mine. 

A style that is clear, simple, and harmonious, 
must neither be debased by colloquial phrases not- 
involved in its sentences tillan inextricable confusion 
pervades them. Its clearness or perspicuity will 
depend upon a skilful use of precise and definite. 
terms judiciously collocated. The writer must 
fully comprehend himself before he can be com- 
prehended by others, and he must distinctly weigh 
the import of the words he employs. He will then 
be intelligible. 

Simplicity arises from many of those cir- 
cumstances which constitute perspicuity, but in 
addition to what exclusively belongs to the latter, 
must be added a lucid construction of the sen- 
tences and of each subordinate member. AH ex- 
pletives must be rejected, all implication of distinct 
propositions, and all endeavours at point, antithesis 



446 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

or specious glitter. The words should be verna- 
cular, as far as possible, and seldom such as are 
removed from familiar use, yet not degenerating 
into those that are colloquial. The employment 
of all figurative modes of composition is hostile 
to simplicity, which aims, or should aim, at com- 
municating ideas with easy and unconstrained 
elegance. 

Harmony in writing results partly from the prac- 
tice of these methods, and partly from the influ- 
ence of a correct ear, to which the slightest disso- 
nance is offensive. To effect an harmonious style, 
much attention must be paid to the disposition of 
the sentences : they must neither be broken with 
uniform brevity, nor expanded into tedious pro- 
lixity ; a skilful intermixture is what should be 
attempted. Nor, if we would write harmoniously, 
must we disdain to watch the position even of sin- 
gle words, according to which it will greatly de- 
pend whether a sentence reads with graceful flu- 
ency, or halts upon the tongue with an irregula- 
rity of cadence. Minute as these things may ap- 
pear, they must not be beneath his attention who 
aims at producing an harmonious style. 

In all these requisites, I know no English writer 
who has approached nearer to the perfection of 
them than Goldsmith. Of him alone, perhaps, it 
may be said, that his style is harmonious without 
affectation, easy without weakness, and perspi- 
cuous without vulgarity. My opinion of his die- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 447 

tion I have given on a recent occasion*, and will 
repeat it here, if an author may be allowed to 
quote from himself ; of which, however, the prac- 
tice of the age gives precedent. 

" In the structure of his sentences he has greater 
harmony, and greater variety than Addison. In 
his language he is more scrupulous. He does not 
offend so often by colloquial phrases or obsolete 
combinations. His prose is not so feeble, nor so 
coldly regular. In felicity of expression, when in- 
tended to convey a plain and simple idea, or a 
natural emotion of common minds, he is, perhaps, 
unequalled. 

" A very conspicuous merit of Goldsmith's 
prose is the lucid arrangement of his sentences. — 
Every word and every period appear to be just 
where they ought to be. We have no evidence 
that he composed slowly, or that he laboured much 
to correct what he had once written : and such 
perspicuity of arrangement is, therefore, the more 
remarkable in a man whose ideas in conversation 
were so perplexed and so confused. 

" Harmony, simplicity, clearness, and propri- 
ety, in relation to the matter, are the predominant 
qualities of Goldsmith's general style; but as he 
was also capable of elevation, I may add to the 
above, occasional dignity and energy of language. 

* In " The Contemplatist : a series of Essaj'S upon Moral* and Litera- 
ture." 1810. 



448 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

As a model to be studied, I should prefer it to 
Addison's, for it is more pure/' 

How remote Cumberland's practice was from 
his own opinion, let me now proceed to shew. I 
shall not enter into minute illustrations of his 
errors, but select such as will testify for them- 
selves. 

I have already mentioned the singularly involved 
paragraph with which the Observer commences, 
and which certainly ought not to have been found 
in the pages of a writer who aspired to harmony 
and perspicuity of style. Nor ought the following 
to belong to him who believed that he wrote with 
purity and simplicity. 

" I am anxious that I may neither make my 
first advances with the stiff grimace of a dancing- 
master, nor with the too familiar air of a self-im- 
portant." (No. 1.) 

To the introduction of new terms, when unne- 
cessary, every lover of the language should oppose 
himself. If all writers are to be allowed that ca- 
pricious innovation, where will the influx stop, 
and when will the language be fixed ? Our dic- 
tionaries, like our almanacks, must be annual, 
while this laxity is tolerated. 

" Several of our diurnal essayists have contrived, 
under the veil of fiction, to hook in something re- 
commendatory of themselves. " (No. 3.) 

" I was the more disgusted, when I perceived 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 449 

that by the nonsensical zigzaggery of the road, 
&c." (No. 4.) 

Are these the phrases of a man distinguished for 
simplicity and harmony of style ? 

In the following sentence the word tawdry is 
employed as synonimous with meretricious ; a 
sense which it has not in any writer whom I should 
regard as an authority, but one in which Cumber- 
land frequently employs it. 

" I mean trials for adultery, the publishers of 
which are not content with setting down every 
thing verbatim from their short-hand records, which 
the scrutinizing necessity of law draws out by 
pointed interrogatory, but they are also made to 
allure the curiosity of the passenger by tawdry en- 
gravings, in which the heroine of the tale is dis- 
played in effigy, and the most indecent scene of 
her amours selected as an eye-trap to attract the 
youth of both sexes ; and by debauching the mo- 
rals of the rising generation, keep up the stock in 
trade, and feed the market with fresh cases for the 
commons, and fresh supplies for the retailers of 
indecency ." 

I have extracted the whole of this passage, be- 
cause the censure which it conveys is as applica- 
ble now, as it could possibly have been when 
Cumberland wrote it. I fear, indeed, it is more 
so. No man can walk the streets of this metropo- 
lis without shuddering as he beholds the violation 
of public decency and morals in those wretches 

2G 



450 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

who earn a disgraceful livelihood by publishing 
circumstantial accounts of all trials that relate to 
the most abhorred of human crimes. Nay, they 
are not satisfied with such opportunities as the 
present guilt of individuals affords ; they rummage 
into the records of adultery and vice — they drag to 
light the forgotten memorials of past infamy — they 
decorate them with flagitious ornaments — and they 
expose them to sale with a daring contempt of all 
decorum. Their transgressions continue without 
reproof or punishment, and our wives and daugh- 
ters are polluted by the readiest channel of conta- 
mination, as they walk along the public streets ; 
the ignorant are initiated into depravity ; and the 
unwary are seduced to the consciousness of of- 
fences which, from knowing, they soon learn per- 
haps to perpetrate. 

O proceres censore opus est, an haruspice nobis ? 

We have among us a self-constituted society, 
who have distinguished themselves by many en- 
croachments upon the humbler comforts of the 
poor, without daring to attack the strong holds of 
the rich : they have excited very general indigna- 
tion and contempt by the fanatic zeal with which 
they seek to oppress the unresisting, and drag 
petty delinquents to the bar of justice, while their 
sanctity of heart does not rouse them to arrest the 
career of haughty and patrician vice ; they have 
visited, with their terrors, the barber's shop and the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 451 

apple-stalls of defenceless old women; nay, they 
have fulminated their anathemas against the inde- 
cencies of sculpture, and have commanded the na- 
kedness ©f chubby boys at the door of a snuff-shop 
to be cloathed. These things they have done with 
an acrimonious perseverance which a better- cause 
might have dignified, if indeed any cause can dig- 
nify the use of hired spies, who fawn about their 
victims only to betray them. I have long wished 
them a better office, after having first wished 
them extinct, as I ever must every species of in- 
quisitorial tyranny ; and now I propose one to 
them. There is no one who would not rejoice if 
they exerted their power to suppress these most 
offensive nuisances; if they shielded, from conta- 
mination, the minds of youth and the innocency of 
virtue; and if they punished with deserved seve- 
rity beings whose conduct no punishment, per- 
haps, can adequately reach. Let them do this, 
and merit the applause of every good man ; let them 
continue their petty vexations, and receive the 
contempt of every liberal one. 

In returning to my illustration of Cumber- 
land's verbal inaccuracies, I must observe that I 
have omitted to specify those negligences which I 
had already animadverted on in examining the 
West Indian, as the repetition would be useless ; 
and I have also omitted the enumeration of many 
others, because I do not wish to load my pages 
with the easiest, and perhaps the meanest, of ail 
2 G3 



4j2 life of Cumberland. 

critical exertion. Yet, having entered upon the 
office, I must discharge it with what brevity and 
propriety I can. 

In Number SI, I find another innovation (the 
verb to locate,) which Cumberland has employed 
oil various occasions in the course of his writings. 
We do not want it, however ; and I reckon it there- 
fore a superfluous violation of the standard terms 
of the language, 

" An arch fellow brought & furious large fir ap- 
ple to the famous lawyer, &c." (No. 52.) 

Cumberland could not have supported this 
vulgar use of the epithet furious, by any autho- 
rity : but I will not say as much of the follow- 
ing term, though it is unequivocally mean and 
colloquial. 

" He began to turn over all the resources of his 
invention for some happy fetch." (No. 88.) 

I find so few of Cumberland's sentences con- 
structed with harmony or perspicuity, that in se- 
lecting one or two in support of my assertion, I 
need be at no other trouble than to open the vo- 
lume, and copy the first that presents itself. The 
fact is, that to me his style appears remarkable for 
a peculiar looseness and obscurity ; and he seems, 
when he began a sentence, never to have known how 
he should end it, but to have continued writing till 
he found himself at the conclusion of a paragraph, 
or of an idea. They certainly are not artificially 
composed ; they resemble rather the desultory in- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 453 

coherence of conversation, where a man chats at 
his ease, excogitates an opinion and tells it, with 
what periphrasis, and pauses, and tautologies, indo- 
lence or necessity may force upon him. But how 
different from this were the polished periods of 
Goldsmith, and how preferable the energetic ones 
of Johnson. 

In the following paragraph (actually selected 
without any seeking,) the reader will have a com- 
plete exemplification of every thing that I have 
said. I shall put in italics all that is superfluous, 
or otherwise liable to censure. 

" I must not omit to tell yo?£, that to my infinite 
comfort it turned out, that my precautions after the 
death of the Monk were effectual for prevent- 
ing any mischief to the head of my family, who 
still preserves his rank, title, and estate, unsus- 
pected ; and although I was outlawed by name, 
time hath now wrought such a change in my per- 
son, and the affair hath so died away in mens me- 
mories, that I trust I am in security from any fu- 
ture machinations in that quarter: still I hold it 
just to my family, and prudent towards myself, to 
continue my precautions ; upon the little fortune 
I raised in Smyrna, with some aids I have occa- 
sionally received from the head of our house, who 
is my nephew, and several profitable commissions 
for the sale of Spanish wool, I live contentedly, 
though humbly, as you see, and I have besides 
wherewithal (blessed be God!) to be of some use 



454 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

use and assistance to my fellow-creatures."— 
(No. 44.) 

All the words which are in italics, might have 
been omitted, without any injury to the meaning 
of the author, as he wrote the paragraph. Its fee- 
ble protraction, its involution of clauses, and un- 
skilful construction, are sufficiently evident : but, 
to make it more so, (as I do not hold it a very daring 
undertaking to attempt a verbal improvement of 
Cumberland,) I will now shew with what brevity 
and force the same ideas might have been commu- 
nicated. This will be the true test, both of the 
thing itself, and of my competency to dispute that 
excellence in writing which Cumberland assumed 
to himself. 

" I must not omit to tell, that, to my infinite 
comfort, my precautions, after the monk's death, 
effectually prevented any mischief to the head of 
my family, who still preserves, unsuspected, his 
rank, title, and estate. I was outlawed; but time 
has wrought such a change in my person, and the 
affair has so died away, that I trust I need fear no 
future machinations from that quarter ; but I hold 
it just to my family, and prudent towards myself, 
to continue my precautions. Upon the little for- 
tune which I raised in Smyrna, with some aids I 
have occasionally received from my nephew, who 
is the head of our house, and several profitable 
commissions for the sale of Spanish wool, I live 
contentedly, though, as you see, humbly. I have 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 4:55 

enough however (and blessed be God !) to be of 
some assistance to my fellow-creatures/' 

Let the reader judge. I have not censured 
with vague and general accusation : I have sub- 
stantiated my affirmations. I have done more: 
I have endeavoured to shew how the errors I con- 
demn might have been avoided : I have provoked 
a comparison, in which I do not expect success, 
because I have put it in every man's power to de- 
prive me of it by a simple denial, without the ne- 
cessity of supporting it by evidence. 

One more example of a sentence expanded to a 
paragraph, and I have done. 

" I must, therefore, again and again, insist 
upon it, that there are two sides to every argu- 
ment, and that it is the natural and unalienable 
right of man to be heard in support of his opinion, 
he having first lent a patient ear to the speaker, 
who maintains sentiments that oppose that opinion: 
I do humbly apprehend that an overbearing voice, 
and noisy volubility of tongue, are prqofs of a very 
underbred* fellow ; and it is with regret I see so- 
ciety too frequently disturbed in its most delecta- 
ble enjoyments, by this odious character: I do 
not see that any man hath a right, by obligation or 
otherwise, to lay me under a necessity of think- 
ing exactly as he thinks ; though I admit that 
c from the fulness of the heart the tongue speak - 

* Where could Cumberland have found this term ? Not in any writer 
of acknowledged authority. 



4o6 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

eth/ I do not admit any superior pretensions it 
hath to be Sir Oracle from the fulness of the poc- 
ket." (No. 84.) 

I have forborne here to put in italics the same 
circumlocutions and defects which I noticed in 
the former extract ; nor shall I weary the reader 
by recapitulating it in what I may consider a bet- 
ter mode of construction. Such minuteness is not 
now necessary. It is- evident, however, that to a 
sentence thus copiously diffused, there seems no 
necessary limit, except the termination of the pa- 
per itself, or the accidental division of a paragraph. 
It may be amusing to see how some of the writers, 
of the seventeenth century, excelled in this kind 
of harmony and clearness of style. The following 
example is from a man, of no mean note in his own 
or the present age. 

" A second defect, much contributing to the 
public detriment, by the non-improvement of scho- 
lars when they are well trained in the university, 
and fit to be transplanted out of those nurseries, 
(that being set thinner they may spread wider, 
grow bigger, and bear much more fruit,) is the 
want of public care and patrociny to prefer and 
dispose of them so as may be most agreeable to 
their abilities; many times their modesty much 
curbs their activity, (like ears of corn and boughs 
of trees, the more loaden, the more hidden and 
dejected,) and being wholly destitute of such 
friends and relations as might put them forward, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 457 

they have this to answer any that ask why they 
stand still till the ninth hour of the day, because 
no man hath hired them, or set them on work, or 
preferred them ; besides this, the swarms or les- 
ser fray of other meaner scholars, who have but a 
little tincture of learning in comparison, and who, 
like barnacles or Solerne geese, too soon drop off 
from the university, betaking themselves to coun- 
try cures, according as their necessities compel 
them; these so forestal the markets of parochial 
livings and church preferments, gaining by their 
obsequiousness and adherencies, the favour and 
friendship of such patrons as have any thing worth 
acceptance in their dispose, that many other good 
scholars are left to superannuate in their solitudes, 
to be confined to their muses everlastingly, as if 
their ears had been bored through and fixed to the 
college gates or study doors: as Democritus, ju- 
nior, most elegantly and pathetically deplores this 
dereliction of rare men in the university, which 
makes the muses melancholy, and depriving both 
merit and reward, and the public of that good 
which these men might do as master builders 
in God's temple." (Bishop Gaudens Life of 
Hooker.) 

When a man gets to the end of a sentence like 
this, he takes time to breathe, and consider whe- 
ther he comprehends what he has been reading ; 
he retraces the intricate confusion, and finds no- 
thing to compensate for its obscurity, but the flow- 



458 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

ersof a rich imagination, which, though scattered 
about in quaint devices, refresh the mind and gra- 
tify the eye. No one, however, ever thought of 
praising such a style for its harmony or per- 
spicuity. 

I should not have pursued this inquiry into the 
defects of Cumberland's diction, had he not in- 
cautiously intimated his belief that it was faultless. 
When he expressed his opinion that it was a mo- 
del which could not mislead ; that it was simple, 
clear, and harmonious ; and that it was neither in- 
elegant nor unclassical, I thought it my duty to 
examine his pretensions, and to ascertain their va- 
lidity. I have done so : and though I have found 
his practice greatly beneath his own opinion of its 
excellence, I am willing to believe him sincere, 
when he professed that his object had been, all his 
life, to " reform and purify his native language/' 
The task, however, was beyond his power. He 
has met the common fate of those who labour 
to effect simplicity of style : he is too often mean 
and colloquial, when he thinks he is writing with 
simplicity and elegance. The happy medium 
between that and turgidity is seldom attained. — 
Cumberland certainly missed it. 

Yet, though I should never venture to propose 
his compositions as a model for imitation, I am not 
unconscious that he has written, in general, with 
fluency and plainness. He seldom endeavours 
after ornaments ; and I imagine it was because he 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 459 

knew he could not reach them, for when he does 
strive, it is rarely with success. His prose is 
equable and familiar, and seldom rises beyond a 
very ordinary level. I have examined it with a 
minuteness of verbal criticism to which I should 
have been tempted by no other motive than his as- 
sumption of such perfection as I knew it did not 
possess: and I now close my remarks upon the 
Observer, with observing, that it has a fair claim 
to maintain its station among the embodied essay- 
ists of the country, and that the name of its au- 
thor will be known to posterity rather by this than 
by any other of his productions, 



460 £I*E OF CUMBERLAND 



CHAP. XX. 

Cumberland's inconsistency in his own statements 
about himself. — An apt quotation from La Fon- 
taine.— Observations upon the controversy be- 
tween Mr. Hayley and Cumberland respecting 
the life of Romney. — Produces the tragedy of 
the Carmelite. — Mrs. Siddons and Mr. 
Kemble. — Examination of the Carmelite. — 
Cumberland commemorates his friendship for 
Sir James Bland Rurges, Mr. Sharp, and 
Mr. Rogers. — ~Some advice to the latter gen- 
tleman on his poetical powers. — Cumberland' s 
daughter declines the interference of these three 
gentlemen in arranging her fathers posthumous 
papers. 

The inconsistencies into which Cumberland is 
sometimes betrayed, in speaking of himself, shew 
with how little certainty any man can hope to 
preserve the truth even with the most reve- 
rential regard for its sanctity. When we write 
of others, we are in danger of listening too wil- 
lingly to the voice of envy which whispers in our 
ears, that censure is but justice ; when we write 
of ourselves, we are exposed to the attacks of every 
passion, that can obscure the perception of truth 
and mislead the judgment. La Fontaine has intro- 
duced one of his tales with some lines of profound 
sagacity on this topic : 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 46l 

Je soupconne fort une histone, 
CJuand le heros en est l'auteur ; 
L' amour propre et la vaine gloire 
Rendent souvent l'homme vanteur. 
On fait toujours si bien son compte 
Qu'on tire de l'honneur detout ce qu'on raconte. 

At page 188 of this work, the reader will find 
that I have adverted to a contradiction in Cumber- 
land's statement of his mode of study. I have 
there quoted his words, in which he says, " that 
in all his hours of study, it had been his object, 
through life, so to locate himself as to have little or 
nothing to distract his attention;" and I con- 
trasted this declaration with the manner in which 
he confesses that he wrote his comedy of The 
Brothers. But the confusion is still increased in 
the second volume of his Memoirs, p. 204, where, 
speaking of the ease with which he composed at 
any hour, or in any place, he affirms that " he had 
never been accustomed to retire to his study for 
silence and meditation ; in fact, his book room, at 
Tunbridge Wells, was occupied as a bed room, 
and what books he had occasion to consult he 
brought down to the common sitting room, where, 
in company with his wife and family, (neither in- 
terrupting them, nor interrupted by them), he 
wrote the Observer, or whatever else he had in 
hand." 

Let the reader reconcile this contrariety of rela- 
tion as he can ; to me it seems the effect either of 
negligence, of defective memory, or of a momen- 



462 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tary desire, at one time, to assume all the solem- 
nity of studious retirement, and at another, to 
affect that easy fertility of thought which nothing 
can obstruct. 

Some little controversy having existed between 
Mr. Hayley and Cumberland, respecting the life 
of Romney, I shall here briefly advert to it. 

In his Memoirs, Cumberland has given a short 
character of Romney, and has drawn a parallel be- 
tween him and Reynolds. His opinion of him 
seems to have been something less than Mr. Hay- 
ley's, who appears to have contemplated his 
friend with an enthusiasm approaching to venera- 
tion. In his life of Romney, recently published, 
he enters into a laboured defence of him, and 
omits no opportunity, in the progress of his narra- 
tive, to shield him from what he considers as the 
injurious aspersions of Cumberland. Where the 
truth lies I cannot determine ; but Mr. Hayley 
seems to me to be too often the apologist rather 
than the biographer of Romney. His failings 
were in his memory, and the great effort of his 
pen seems to have been to cover them from 
public inspection. 

Cumberland, who probably loved the man as 
well as Mr. Hayley could do, wrote with 
less reserve, told what he thought, and told, per- 
haps, the truth. When Romney died he gave a 
brief sketch of his life and character in the Euro- 
pean Magazine. To this Mr. Hayley frequently 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 465 

alludes in his late publication, but it is seldom for 
any other purpose than to dispute its veracity. 
He does it, however, without any offensive aspe- 
rity of language or insinuation, which indeed 
would have been ill-bestowed upon a man who 
had proved one of Romney's earliest friends, by 
endeavouring to bring him before the public at 
a time when his own diffidence made him shrink 
from all attempts to force himself into popularity. 

Mr. Hayley sometimes quibbles, however, in his 
friend's defence. Cumberland had said that Rom- 
ney's was an " inglorious grave/' because he died 
and was buried in a remote part of England. To this 
epithet Mr. Hayley objects. " Surely," says he, 
" the talents and the virtues of our departed friend 
were sufficient to dignify any sepulchre, in which 
it could be his destiny to rest." There may be 
much subtlety in this position ; but if the ashes 
of a great man confer dignity upon the spot that 
contains them, all monumental honours are but 
superfluous violations of that dignity. Had Alex- 
ander been entombed in a dunghill, or Shakspeare 
quietly inurned beneath a common sewer, man- 
kind would have consented to hold both places in 
veneration ; but their dignity would have existed 
only in the minds of those who, like Mr. Hayley, 
confound two notions essentially distinct. 

I have already mentioned that Cumberland dedi- 
cated his two u Odes" to Romney, which were 
an unequivocal testimony of his friendship for the 



464 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

man, and his admiration of the artist. Nor was 
this the only proof he gave. The following lines 
contain an elegant tribute to both : 

et When Gothic rage had put the arts to flight, 

And wrapt the world in universal night, 

When the dire northern swarm with seas of blood, 

Had drown'd creation in a second flood, 

When all was void, disconsolate and dark, 

Rome in her ashes found one latent spark, 

She, not unmindful of her ancient name, 

Nurs'd her last hope, and fed the sacred flame ; 

Still as it grew, new streams of orient light 

Beam'd on the world, and cheer'd the fainting sight ; 

Rous'd from the tombs of the illustrious dead, 

Immortal science rear'd her mournful head ; 

And mourn she shall, to time's extremest hour, 

The dire effects of Omar's savage power, 

When rigid Amrou's too obedient hand 

Made Alexandria blaze at his command ; 

Six months he fed the sacrilegious flame 

With the stor'd volumes of recorded fame : 

There died all memory of the great and good, 

Then Greece and Rome were finally subdu'd. 

Yet monkish ignorance had not quite effac'd 
All that the chissel wrought, the pencil trac'd ; 

Some precious reliques of the ancient hoard, 
Or happy chance, or curious search restor'd j 
The wond'ring artist kindled as he gaz'd, 
And caught perfection from the work he prais'd. 

Of painters, then the celebrated race, 
Rose into fame with each attendant grace ; 
Still, as it spread, the wonder-dealing art . . 

Improv'd the manners and reformed the heart : 
Darkness dispers'd, and Italy became 
Once more the seat of elegance and fame. 
Late, very late, on this sequester'd isle, 
The heav'n descended art was seen to smile ; 
Seldom she came to this storm-beaten coast, 
And short her stay, just seen, admir'd, and lost . 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 46.5 

Reynolds at length, her favourite suitor, bore 

The blushing stranger to his native shore ; 

He by no mean, no selfish motives sway'd 

To public view held forth the liberal maid, 

Call'd his admiring countrymen around, 

Freely declar'd what raptures he had found ; 

Told them that merit would alike impart 

To him or them a passage to her heart. 

Rous'd at the call, all came to view her charms, 

All press'd, all strove to clasp her in their arms ; 

See Coats, and Dance, and Gainsborough seize the spoil ; 

And ready Mortimer that laughs at toil ; 

Crown'd with fresh roses graceful Humphry stands, 

While beauty grows immortal from his hands ; 

Stubbs, like a lion, springs upon his prey, 

With bold eccentric Wright, that hates the day \ 

Familiar Zoffany, with comic art, 

And West, great painter of the human heart. 

These, and yet more unnam'd, that to our eyes 

Bid lawns, and groves, andtow'ring mountains rise, 

Point the bold rock, or stretch the bursting sail, 

Smooth the calm sea, or drive th' impetuous gale : 

Some hunt 'midst fruit and flowery wreaths for fame, 
And Elmer springs it in the feather'd game. 
Apart, and bending o'er the the azure tide, 
With heavenly Contemplation by his side, 
A pensive artist stands — in thoughtful mood, 
With downcast looks he eyes the ebbing flood : 
No wild ambition swells his temperate heart, 
Himself as pure, as patient as his art, 
Nor sullen sorrow, nor intemperate joy, 
The even tenour of his thoughts destroy, 
An undistinguish'd candidate for fame, 
At once his country's glory and its shame; 
Rouse, then, at length, with honest pride inspir'd, 
Romney, advance! be known, and be admir'd.' 5 

In 1784 Cumberland produced his tragedy of 
the Carmelite, This drama, when published, he 
dedicated to Mrs. Sicldons, and in his Memoirs 

2 H 



466 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 

he repeats the obligations he was under to that 
matchless actress, then in the day-spring of her 
fame, and the full bloom of all her talents ; now, 
no less excellent, but shortly to withdraw from 
the eyes of applauding multitudes. He men- 
tions, likewise, the assistance which her brother, 
Mr. Kemble, gave to the performance, who was, 
at that time, says he, " in the full stature and 
complete maturity of one of the finest forms that 
probably was ever exhibited upon a public stage." 
He too is still among us, nor is there any promise 
of a successor when he shall see fit to retire. He 
has trod the stage for many years, during which he 
has gone beyond all rivalry ; nor do I know the 
actor now living, whom I could wish to see in any 
of those characters which I have hitherto seen in 
Mr. Kemble's hands. His range is not so wide as 
Garrick's, and they who remember that performer, 
may think, perhaps, that he does not always reach 
the same perfection in the same characters, but 
this is an invidious comparison. Compare Mr. 
Kemble with his theatrical contemporaries, and 
who among them can match him at all points ? 

I pay this tribute to his excellence very wil- 
lingly, for I have often been delighted with the 
display of it. Once> such a testimony might have 
been liable to the imputation of friendly partiality: 
but Mr. Kemble knows that no such imputation 
can now exist ; and / hope he knows why it can- 
not. For me to tell the cause would seem too 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 467 

much like offering an opportunity for its re- 
moval. 

It was a natural transition in Cumberland, after 
commemorating the talents of such an actress and 
such an actor, to turn, with some asperity, to that 
degrading folly which once led countless crowds 
to gaze upon, and applaud, the boyish exhibitions 
of an unformed youth. Him too, I saw, but never 
with satisfaction. I could have endured him as a 
child of very commendable acquirements, but 
when I saw the ideas and language of Shakspeare 
committed to his charge, when I heard him whin- 
ing out the accents of love, without passion, or 
vociferating the boisterousness of rage, without 
the capability of feeling what he uttered ; when I 
beheld him vainly striving to pourtray the inmost 
workings of the heart, by cold and artificial mi- 
micry, I turned disgusted from the profanation, 
and lamented that degeneracy of public taste, or 
that voracious appetite for novelty, which could 
patiently endure any thing so preposterous. The 
delusion, however, is gone by ; but it was one that 
fully justified the sarcastic acrimony of Cumber- 
land, of a man who had lived through the brightest 
period of our theatrical history, and had seen and 
was still seeing those performers whom taste 
and nature had fashioned to a high degree of 
excellence. 

It is amusing to observe the pertinacity with 
which Cumberland told his literarv sorrows and 

2 H 2 



468 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

afflictions. In the prologue to the Carmelite^ I 
find him again lamenting the hardships he endured 
in the following lines : 

*' Yet bold the bard, to mount ambition's wave, 
And launch his wit upon a watery grave ; 
Sharp critic rocks beneath him lie in wait, 
And envious quicksands bar the muses' straight ; 
Wild o'er his head Detraction's billows break; 
Doubt chills his heart, and terror pales his cheek ; 
Hungry and faint what cordials can he bring 
From the cold nymph of the Pierian spring ? 
What stores collect from bare Parnassus' head, 
Where blooms no vineyard, where no beeves are fed ! 
And great Apollo's laurels, which impart 
Fame to his head, are famine to his heart." 



Did he believe that his lot would be softened by 
this querulousness; or that his enemies would aim 
a weaker blow because he smarted from the 
wound ? 

Of this tragedy it gives me pleasure to speak 
with more commendation than I could bestow 
upon the Battle of Hastings. The language is 
commonly chaste, the images often poetical, and 
the sentiments dignified and pathetic. He seems 
to have rectified his notions of tragic composition, 
and to have discovered that Melpomene does not 
always strut, but sometimes walks with graceful 
ease and sober dignity. There is an even tenor in 
the diction : it rarely rises into bombast, or sinks 
into meanness and imbecility. Perhaps the only 
exception to this opinion may be found in the fol- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 469 

lowing sentence, in which I find both rant and 
anti-climax : 

" Then, then the moon, by whose pale light you struck, 

Turn'd fiery red, and from her angry orb 

Darted contagious sickness on the earth ; 

The planets in their courses shriek'd for horror ; 

Heav'n dropt maternal tears— Oh ! art thou come ?" 

The action of tragedy is one that sufficiently 
interests the spectator, but it is conducted with 
too little art. Had St. Valori concealed his secret 
till the last, (and his premature disclosure of it 
has no influence upon the events), the surprise 
had been greater, and the mind would have sympa- 
thised more intensely with the feelings of Matilda. 
It is the general defect of Cumberland in his plays, 
that he does not preserve the developement of the 
plot sufficiently, without anticipation ; he affords 
too many occasional glimpses in the progress of the 
action, of how it is to terminate ; and as his dra- 
mas have little else but intrigue to support or 
recommend them, for he rarely aims at the delinea- 
tion of character, or the exhibition of prevailing- 
follies, it may be pronounced eminently injudicious 
in him to rob them of that interest which the ob- 
scurity of an intricate fable artfully maintained 
infallibly creates. 

The characters in this play, which require any 
notice, are those of St Valori, Matilda, and Mont- 
gomery St. Valori is drawn with many pleasing 
qualities ; but Matilda is the person who chiefly 



^470 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

occupies our attention. Cumberland formed this 
character entirely for the display of Mrs. Sid- 
dons' powers, as he has avowed, in his dedication 
to that actress ; and he gave her all that dignity, 
pathos, heroic honour, and commanding virtue, 
which she was so eminently qualified to exhibit. 
Montgomeri is invested with all that can excite 
esteem; he is brave, generous, noble, and pious. 
The mystery of his birth increases the interest of 
his character, and affords a happy opportunity for 
the display of maternal feelings in Matilda. 

Hildebrand is pourtrayed merely as a guilty 
assassin, and neither the discovery which absolves 
him from the heaviest part of his crime, nor his 
repentant death awakens much emotion in the 
mind. 

Mrs. Siddons spoke the epilogue to this tragedy. 
It was written by Cumberland, and the last six 
lines are made to express her own gratitude in- 
stead of the author's. They were these : 

" But let no satyrist touch ray lips with gall, 
Lips from which none but grateful words shall fall. 
' Can I forget ?— But I must here be dumb, 
So vast my debt, I cannot count the sum ; 
Words would but fail me, and I claim no art, 
I boast no eloquence— but of the heart. 

About the time when the Carmelite (certainly 
the best of his tragedies) was performed, Cumber- 
land again took up the arms of controversy, and 
encountered with them the Bishop of LlandafT, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 4? 1 

i: one of the ablest scholars/' says he, "and finest 
writers in the kingdom/' The bishop had pub- 
lished a proposal for equalising the revenues of the 
hierarchy and dignitaries of the church established. 
This proposal Cumberland opposed, and he 
thought " he had the best of the argument/' I 
doubt, however, if any man could have the best of 
an argument which gainsayed a proposition so 
equitable and beneficial. He adds also, with 
somewhat more arrogance than could become 
him, that he thought " his lordship did a wiser 
thing in declining the controversy, than in throw- 
ing out the proposal." His lordship's wisdom, in 
declining the controversy, many will admit, per- 
haps, as well as Cumberland, though probably 
not exactly with the same sort of conviction. 

Another temporary thing of controversy, which 
Cumberland wrote, was a pamphlet, entitled, Cur- 
tins rescued from the Gulph. This was directed 
against Dr. Parr, who " had hit an unoffending 
gentleman too hard, by launching a huge fragment 
of Greek at his defenceless head." The under- 
taking was suggested at one of Dilty's literary din- 
ners, and was soon executed ; I have never 
heard, however, that the doctor deigned any re- 
ply, and I suppose Cumberland thought his wis- 
dom no less conspicuous than the Bishop of 
LlandafPs. 

In commemorating the many pleasing hours 
which he passed at the table of Mr. Dilly, he ad- 



4?2 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

verts to the names of those friends who seem to 
have been the dearest of his latter years. Among 
these he mentions Mr. Rogers, and praises his 
elegance of manners, as well as his excellence of 
heart. How justly this commendation is be- 
stowed, let those who know Mr. Rogers best, 
decide ; but when his departed friend tells him 
that he possesses " the brightest genius/' and 
that he is the author of " one of the most beauti- 
ful and harmonious poems in our language," I 
would entreat him accurately to weigh the im- 
port of these words before he believes in their ap- 
plication. Perhaps, however, this caution is un- 
necessary ; perhaps he knows, as well as I do, that 
weakness which his friend had, of praising those 
he loved, with an exuberance of adulation which 
not even the tenderness of regard could justify ; and 
he receives, perhaps, this tribute to his " genius," 
as the benevolent effusion of a man who wrote 
from his heart rather than from his head. 

I have read Mr. Rogers' poem on the " Plea- 
sures of Memory," but found few things in it that 
gave me pleasure to remember. It is smoothly 
versified, and contains, occasionally, some pleasing 
reflections ; but this is all ; and I do not think that 
even the influence of his u elegance of manners," 
or " excellence of heart," were I within the 
sphere of their operation, could induce me to con- 
sider it as one of the " most beautiful and harmo- 
nious poems in our language," while I retained 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 473 

those pleasures of memory which the recollection 
of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, 
and Akenside's works are so apt to produce. 

I should be happy, however, to see the fantasti- 
cal citation of Cumberland duly answered by Mr. 
Rogers. Let him " stand forth in the title page 
of some future work that shall be in substance 
greater, indignity of subject more sublime, and in 
purity of versification, " superior to his poem 
already mentioned, and I would be among the first 
to confess his " genius," and extend the know- 
ledge of it as far as my praise could have any 
influence. 

Another gentleman, to whom Cumberland pays 
a tribute of affection, is Mr. Sharpe, of Mark-lane. 
To him it seems the public are indebted for the 
suggestion of writing those Memoirs of which so 
much is already known. The original intention, 
however, was to have withheld them till after the 
death of Cumberland : but the embarrassment of 
his circumstances rendered it necessary to depart 
from this resolution ; and he sold the copy-right of 
them to his publishers for 500/. The truth of this 
statement Cumberland attests upon the authority 
of the following lines, which he addressed to Mr. 
Sharpe, and which contain so honourable and 
affectionate a testimony of his worth and virtue, 
that I should not hold myself blameless if I sup- 
pressed them here. 



474 ' LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" To Richard Sharpe, Esq. of Mark Lane. 
" If rime e'er spoke the language of the heart, 
Or truth employ'd the measur'd phrase of art, 
Believe me, Sharpe, this verse, which smoothly flow: 
Hath all the rough sincerity of prose. 
False flattering words from eager lips may fly, 
But who can pause to harmonise a lie ? 
Or e'er he made the jingling couplet chime, 
Conscience would start and reprobate the rhyme. 
If then 'twere merely to entrap your ear 
I call'd you friend, and pledg'd myself sincere, 
Genius would shudder at the base design, 
And my hand tremble as I shap'd the line. 
Poets oft times are tickled with a word, 
That gaily glitters at the festive board, 
And many a man, my j udgment can't approve, 
Hath trick'd my foolish fancy of its love ; 
For every foible natural to my race 
Finds for a time with me some fleeting place ; 
But occupants so weak have no controul, 
No fix'd and legal tenure in my soul, 
Nor will my reason quit the faithful clue, 
That points to truth, to virtue, and to you. 

In the vicissitudes of life we find ' 
Strange turns and twinings in the human mind, 
And he, who seeks consistency of plan, 
Is little vers'd in the great map of man ; 
The wider still the sphere in which we live, 
The more our calls to suffer and forgive : 
But from the hour (and many years are past) 
From the first hour I knew you to the last, 
Through every scene, self-center'd, and at rest, 
Your steady character hath stood the test, 
No rash conceits divert your solid thought, 
By patience foster'd and with candour fraught ; 
Mild in opinion, but of soul sincere, 
And only to the foes of truth severe, 
So unobtrusive is your wisdom's tone, 
Your converts hear, and fancy it their own, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. ±7$ 

With hand so fine you probe the festering mind, 
You heal our wounds, and leave no sore behind. 
Now say, my friend — but e'er you touch the task 
Weigh well the burden of the boon I ask— < 
Say, when the pulses of this heart shall cease, 
And my soul quits her cares to seek her peace, 
Will your zeal prompt you to protect the name 
Of one not totally unknown to fame ? 
Will you, who only can the place supply 

Of a lost son, befriend my progeny ? 

For when the wreck goes down there will be found 

Some remnants of the freight to float around, 

Some that long time hath almost snatch'd from sight, 

And more unseen, that struggle for the light ; 

And sure I am the stage will not refuse, 

To lift her curtain for my widow'd Muse, 

Nor will her hearers less indulgent be, 

When that last curtain shall be dropt on me." 

There are some good couplets in this extract, 
besides its general value as an authentic reference 
to a transaction intimately connected with the life 
of Cumberland. 

To the melancholy request contained in these 
lines, Mr. Sharpe acceded, and to him were after- 
wards added, as co-adjutors in the office, Mr. Ro- 
gers and Sir James Bland Burges. The latter gen- 
tleman is very warmly commended by Mr. Cum- 
berland, and his talents are eulogised with a degree 
of fervor amounting to enthusiasm. He was after- 
wards associated with his deceased friend, in the 
composition of the Exodiad, an epic poem. 

" To these three friends," says Cumberland, 
" I devote this task, and upon their judgment I 
rely for the publication or suppression of what 



476 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

they may find among my literary relics ; they are 
all much younger men than I am, and I pray God, 
that death, who cannot long spare me, will not 
draw those arrows from his quiver which fate has 
destined to extinguish them, till they have com- 
pleted a career equal, at least in length to mine, 
crowned with more fame, and graced with much 
more fortune and prosperity. I know that they 
will do what they have said, and faithfully protect 
my posthumous reputation, as 1 have been a 
faithful friend to them and to their living works." 
The reader will surely learn with wonder, that 
this bequest thus solemnly, thus publicly made, has 
been frustrated, by the intervention of Cumber- 
land^ youngest daughter, Mrs. Jansen, his Mari- 
anne, to whom he so tenderly dedicates his Me- 
moirs. She has declined, I have been informed, 
the interference of those friends ; but from what 
motive I do not know ; a powerful one it ought to 
be, to justify her departure from a scheme which 
seems to have been so pleasing, in anticipation, to 
her father, and of whose propriety and importance 
he must have been the most competent judge. I 
hope, very sincerely, that no capricious feeling has 
guided her in this determination. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 477 



CHAP. XXI. 

The Natural Son is produced. — Cumberland's 
excellence in prologues and epilogues asserted. — 
The character of Lady Paragon , the best female 
part he ever drew. — Examination of the other 
characters, and of the language and sentiments. 
— Anecdotes of Lord S A ckville. — His death, 
and his solemn declaration respecting the affair 
of Minden. 

In 1784 Cumberland produced his comedy of the 
Natural Son, the principal incident of which 
seems to be slightly derived from Fielding's Tom 
Jones. The prologue is a good one, and shall be 
transcribed. I do not think, indeed, that Cum- 
berland's merit in this species of writing has 
been sufficiently acknowledged. After Dryden 
and Garrick, he may be allowed to surpass 
all others. The single excellence of Pope, and 
the not much more than single excellence of John- 
son, must not be produced in comparison with the 
various degrees of excellence which Cumberland 
has exhibited in his prologues and epilogues. — 
They often contain some very happy couplets, and 



478 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

occasional displays of wit and humour, not depend- 
ing upon any allusion to the play to which they 
belong, but general and abstracted. The following 
will exemplify this : 

The comic muse as Cyprian records prove 
Was Comus' daughter by the Queen of Love, 
A left hand lineage— whilst the tragic dame 
From legal loins of father Vulcan came ; 
Therefore that muse loves frolic, fun, and joke, 
This bellows blowing, blustering, puff and smoke : 
Hence mother nature's bye-begotten stock 
Are all but chips of the old comic block ; 
For all derive their pedigrees in tail, 
From fathers frolicksom« and mothers frail. 
Therefore, if in this brat of ours you trace 
Some feature of his merry mother's face, 
Sure, sons of Comus, sure you'll let him in 
To your gay brotherhood, as founder's kin. 

A married Muse ! no ; pluses are too wise 
To take a poet's jointure in the skies, 
Th' anticipation of an unborn play, 
Or star sown acres in the milky way : 
So each lives single, like a cloister'd nun, 
But does sometimes as other nuns have done — 
Prays with grave authors— with the giddy prates, 
Or ogles a young poet through the grates. 

Therefore, our rule is, never to inquire 
Who begat whom, what dam, or which the sire ; 
But, soon as e'er the babe breathes vital air 
Take him, and never ask how he got there. 
Some are still born : some sent to mother earth, 
Strangled by critic midwives in their birth ; 
And many an unacknowledg'd foundling lies 
Without a parent's hand to close its eyes ; 
Thus are our bills with deaths dramatic cramm'd, 
And, what is worse,— -to die, is to be damn'd. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 479 

You, the Humane Society, who sit, 

To mitigate the casualties of wit, 

Save a frail Muse's Natural Son from death ! 

He lives on fame, and fame lives on your breath. 



The action of this comedy is not very intricate 
nor very interesting. Its deficiency in interest, 
however, may be attributed to the author's un- 
skilful management of the materials which he pos- 
sessed. With his accustomed negligence he tells 
that in the middle of his play which should have 
been reserved for the end. The disclosure of 
Blushenly's birth by O' Flaherty, and the discovery 
of his relationship to Rueful diminish that plea- 
sure which the spectator would have felt in be-* 
holding Lady Paragon s love for him, founded on 
no other basis then his personal merits. To have 
accepted him as a poor and nameless foundling, 
would have exalted her passion upon the purest 
foundation: but before she can actually do this, 
she knows him as a wealthy heir, and as the off- 
spring of a distinguished family. 

Lady Paragon s character, however, is eminently 
agreeable. I have already said that I consider it 
as the best female part Cumberland ever drew, 
though he was inclined to claim that distinction 
for Lady Davenant in the Mysterious Husband. 
Lady Paragon must have shone with peculiar 
lustre in the performance of Miss Farren. She is 
volatile yet dignified, playful yet discreet, and 
tender and affectionate without a maudlin affecta- 



480 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tion of sensibility. She is just that interesting- 
female in whose company no man could find him- 
self without finding something else, perhaps, which 
would not conduce to his happiness. That un- 
constrained gaiety of manners, which invites a 
lover forward, and that tempered chastity of heart 
which makes him stop before he proceeds too far, 
that arch vivacity which teases without displeasing, 
that unsuspecting frankness which, disdaining 
artifice itself, believes it not in others, and that 
secure confidence in the power of beauty, loveli- 
ness, and virtue, which tempts their possessor to 
play with her prize almost to losing because she 
knows how to lure it back again, as the wanton 
srirl gives mimic freedom to her favourite lin- 
net, but lets it not fly beyond the length of the 
silken cord that holds it, are all displayed with fas- 
cinating skill by Cumberland in the character of 
Lady Paragon; and I can well believe that when 
such an actress as Miss Farren undertook to adorn 
these attributes with living grace and action, the 
effect must have been irresistible. 

Nor is the character of Blushenly without much 
that excites the spectator's pleasure. I could 
wish, however, that his name had not been indi- 
catory of his qualities. It is a paltry resource, and 
one to which Cumberland does not often conde- 
scend. It is a cheap species of wit to call a fearful 
man Mr. Timid, or a passionate one Sir Furious 
Frenzy, ox a languishing love sick girl, Mite Wanton. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 481 

Such compel lations destroy, in some degree, the 
effect of character, by awakening an anticipation of 
what it is to be. 

Rueful and his servant Dumps excited some 
merriment perhaps in representation, but they have 
no power to do it in perusal. Major 0' Flaherty I 
(in which name Cumberland seems to have de- 
lighted) is worse than his predecessor. Mrs. 
Phcebe Latimer, though not new to the stage, 
is amusing in many of her capricious notions. — 
If literature, in a woman, always produced such 
absurdities as are given to this lady, I should 
be among the first to wish that our wives and 
daughters were never allowed to open a book un- 
less it were the Bible or Prayer Book, or perhaps 
honest John Bunyan, with two or three manuals 
of piety. Nay, I should hope some patriotic 
legislator would propose a law to make it a 
high misdemeanour and punishable accordingly, 
for any woman to be seen with a book in her hand, 
save and except, some such as those already men- 
tioned : or perhaps it would be wiser to prohibit 
altogether the instruction of girls in reading: for if 
we entrust the key of a treasure, how can we be 
secure of its application ? Luckily, however, the 
exaggerations of writers have no foundation but the 
chimerical one in their own fancies. 

Cumberland's benevolence led him to make ano- 
ther effort in behalf of the suffering Irish Catholics. 

2 I 



4S2 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

when he put the following sentence into the mouth 
of O* Flaherty : 

" I'll tell you what, Sir Jeffrey, you need not 
be surprised at finding a poor Catholic, like myself, 
an honest man ; you take a ready way to keep us so, 
by shutting us out of your service." 

Cumberland was evidently one who would have 
granted complete civil as well as religious tolera- 
tion to this portion of our fellow subjects. The 
question is involved in difficulties, and this is not 
the place to discuss them. Great names appear in 
behalf of emancipation ; as great are arrayed against 
it : and the time, perhaps, is not now very far 
distant when the final decision can no longer be 
protracted. 

The language of this comedy is supported 
throughout wi th easy elegance. The characters are 
placed in high life, and for such characters Cum- 
berland could never be at a loss to find sentiments 
and expressions. The dialogue is spritely and 
animated beyond his usual tenor ; and some of the 
scenes between Lady Paragon and Blushenly are 
written with a very high degree of comic excel- 
lence. The same may be said of those between 
Mrs. Phcebe Latimer and Blushenly. 

I have noticed but few exceptions to this general 
praise ; yet some there are. I wonder, indeed, 
that Cumberland should have given such phrases 
to Lady Paragon as these : " may I be further" — 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 483 

* 6 Sentiment in the country is clear another thing 
from sentiment in town" — " I can take is as glibly 
as a dish of tea." This may have been the cant 
of fashionable life when Cumberland wrote, and 
may be so still : but Lady Paragon was not the 
representative of that class of fashionable females 
who would have used such a jargon, and therefore 
in her it was improper. 

In attempting to be witty he is sometimes ex- 
tremely dull. When Dumps, who has quoted a fami- 
liar scrap of Latin, says afterwards that he was once 
employed to shew the monuments in Westminster 
Abbey, 0' Flaherty replies, " Oho! you come out 
of the tombs, 'tis no wonder you speak the dead 
languages." The whole scene, indeed, where 
Dumps is first introduced, is far removed from 
legitimate comedy ; it is mere farce. The same 
may be said of the absurd incident of Rueful t s 
being bled by Jack Hustings, and his consequent 
conduct. 

Had Cumberland paused for a moment, I think 
he might have invented a dialogue more amusing 
than the following between Lady Paragon and 
Blushenly. 

Lady P. Well, I protest you are insufferably vain. 
Blush. And I swear you are insupportably handsome. 

Could such unnatural trifling provoke anything 
but contempt in the audience ? 

This comedy was acted the same season as 
■9 I 2 



284 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the Carmelite, and Cumberland speaks of the hos- 
tility with which he was pursued by the newspaper 
writers, as if his celerity in producing were the 
result of avarice and a mean desire to exclude 
all competitors. The ascription of such motives, 
however, could incur disgrace only on the in- 
ventor; though it seems to have had some effect 
upon the success of the play. 

His old friend and patron, Lord Sackville, in 
whose vicinity Cumberland lived, was visibly de- 
clining, about this time, in his health. Of this 
nobleman Cumberland has given an account longer, 
perhaps, than was necessary, for he confounded 
what his own feelings were in remembering a man 
with whom he had so intimately passed a part of 
his life, with what might be the curiosity of the 
reader. The following anecdotes, however, have 
that abstracted interest in them which may justify 
their insertion here, as the production of Cumber- 
land's pen, and as relating to one who had dis- 
tinguished himself as Cumberland's friend. 

" It was too evident that the constitution of 
Lord Sackville, long harassed by the painful visi- 
tation of that dreadful malady the stone, was de- 
cidedly giving way. There was in him so gene- 
rous a repugnance against troubling his friends with 
any complaints, that it was from external evidence 
only, never from confession, that his sufferings 
could be guessed at. Attacks, that would have 
confined most people to their beds, never moved 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 485 

him from his habitual punctuality. It was curious, 
and probably in some men's eyes would from its 
extreme precision have appeared ridiculously mi- 
nute and formal, yet in the movements of a do- 
mestic establishment so large as his, it had its uses 
and comforts, which his guests and family could 
not fail to partake of. As sure as the hand of the 
clock pointed to the half-hour after nine, neither 
a minute before nor a minute after, so sure did the 
good lord of the castle step into his breakfast room, 
accoutred at all points according to his own in- 
variable costuma, with a complacent countenance, 
that prefaced his good-morning to each person 
there asembled ; and now whilst I recal these 
scenes to my remembrance, I feel gratified by the 
reflection, that I never passed a night beneath his 
roof, but that his morning's salutation met me at 
my post. He allowed an hour and a half for 
breakfast, and regularly at eleven took his morning's 
circuit on horseback at a foot's-pace, for his in- 
firmity would not admit of any strong gestation ; 
he had an old groom, who had grown grey in his 
service, that was his constant pilot upon these ex- 
cursions, and his general custom was to make the 
tour of his cottages to reconnoitre the condition 
they were in, whether their roofs were in repair, 
their windows whole, and the gardens well cropped 
and neatly kept; all this it was their interest to be 
attentive to, for he bought the produce of their fruit 
trees, and I have heard him say with great satisfaction 



486 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

that he has paid thirty shillings in a season fop 
strawberries only to a poor cottager, who paid him 
one shilling annual rent for his tenement and gar- 
den ; this was the constant rate, at which he let 
them to his labourers, and he made them pay it 
his steward at his yearly audit, that they might 
feel themselves in the class of regular tenants, and 
sit down at table to the good cheer provided for 
them on the audit-day. He never rode out without 
preparing himself with a store of sixpences in his 
waistcoat pocket for the children of the poor, who 
opened gates and drew out sliding bars for him in his 
passage through the enclosures: these barriers were 
well watched, and there was rarely any employ- 
ment for a servant ; but these sixpences were not 
indiscriminately bestowed, for as he kept a charity 
school upon his own endowment, he knew to 
whom he gave them, and generally held a short 
parley with the gate-opener as he paid his toll for 
passing. Upon the very first report of illness or 
accident relief was instantly sent, and they were 
put upon the sick list, regularly visited, and con- 
stantly supplied with the best medicines admi- 
nistered upon the best advice : if the poor man 
lost his cow, or his pig, or his poultry, the loss was 
never made up in money, but in stock. It was 
his custom to buy the cast-oif liveries of his own 
Servants as constantly as the day of cloathing came 
about, and these he distributed to the old and 
worn-out labourers, who turned out daily on the 



LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 487 

lawn and padtloc in the Sackville livery to pick 
up boughs and sweep up leaves, and, in short, do 
just as much work as serve to keep them whole- 
some and alive. 

" To his religious duties this good man was not 
only regularly but respectfully attentive ; on the 
Sunday morning he appeared in gala, as if he was 
dressed for a drawing room ; he marched out his 
whole family in grand cavalcade to his parish 
church, leaving only a centinel to watch the fires 
at home, and mount guard upon the spits. His 
deportment in the house of prayer was exemplary, 
and more in character of times past than of time 
present : he had a way of standing up in sermon- 
time for the purpose of reviewing the congregation, 
and awing the idlers into decorum, that never 
failed to remind me of Sir Roger de Coverly at 
church; sometimes, when he has been struck with 
passages in the discourse, which he wished to point 
out to the audience as rules for moral practice 
worthy to be noticed, he would mark his appro- 
bation of them with such cheering nods and signals 
of assent to the preacher, as were often more than 
my muscles could withstand ; but when to the 
total overthrow of all gravity, in his zeal to en- 
courage the efforts of a very young declaimer in 
the pulpit, I heard him cry out to the Reverend 
Mr. Henry Eatoff in the middle of his sermon, — 
' Well done, Harry !' It was irresistible ; sup- 
pression was out of my power: what made it more 



488 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

intolerably comic was, the unmoved sincerity of 
his manner, and his surprise to find that any thing 
had passed, that could provoke a laugh so out of 
time and place. He had nursed up with no small 
care and cost, in each of his parish churches, a corps 
of rustic psalm-singers, to whose performances he 
paid the greatest attention, rising up, and with 
his eyes directed to the singing gallery, marking 
time, which was not always rigidly adhered to, 
and once, when his ear, which was very correct, 
had been tortured by a tone most glaringly dis- 
cordant, he set his mark upon the culprit by 
calling out to him by name, and loudly saying, 
4 Out of tune, Tom Baker V Now this faulty mu- 
sician, Tom Baker, happened to be his lordship's 
butcher, but then in order to set names and trades 
upon a par, Tom Butcher was his lordship's baker ; 
which I observed to him was much such a recon- 
cilement of cross partners as my illustrious friend 
George Faulkner hit upon, when in his Dublin 
Journal he printed — 4 Erratum in our last — For 
His Grace the Duchess of Dorset read Her Grace 
the Duke of Dorset." 5 

The display of these peculiarities in great men 
afford us that insight into human nature which 
is, perhaps, the most valuable result of all inquiry. 
If the position be true, that man is our proper 
study, (and I believe no reach of general argument 
can disprove it), then it will follow that every 
thing which facilitates that study, or which in- 






LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 489 

creases our consequent knowledge, deserves to be 
held in a degree of estimation in proportion to its 
power of producing such effects. 

With Lord Sackville Cumberland was present 
when the last awful preparation for a future state 
was administered, and he communicated with him. 
A short time previously to his death, also, he had 
an interesting conversation touching the affair of 
Minden, from which, and from what he said in his 
last moments, Cumberland deduces this opinion, 
" that if he did not from his heart, and upon the 
most entire conviction of his reason and under- 
standing, solemnly acquit that injured man, (now 
gone to his account) of the opprobrious and 
false imputations deposed against him at his trial, 
he must be either brutally ignorant or wilfully 
obstinate against the truth/" 

This is a solemn declaration springing from a 
solemn evidence, and though the immediate in- 
terest of the transaction is gone by, I feel a plea- 
sure in repeating it in this work. That which 
tends to exculpate innocence from foul and un- 
merited aspersion, can never be too often told nor 
too widely diffused. It is a mutual debt which 
man owes to man : and I wish I could add that 
it is a debt which every man willingly pays. 



490 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. XXIL 

Rapidity of production not always consistent with 
excellence, — The comedy of the Impostors very 
inferior to the other plays of Cumberland. — The 
novel of Arundel.— The degraded name of a 
novel. — The eminent merit of this one. — Argu- 
ments in favour of duelling. — Opposed by an 
extract from Nubilia. — The characters drawn 
with great felicity. — Love exhibited by Cumber- 
land superior to any other English writer of 
novels. — Sometimes trespasses on delicacy. — His 
excuse for this, and its futility. 

No one, who has contemplated the list of Cum- 
berland's productions, or whose business it has 
been, like mine, to examine them all with critical 
attention, will doubt the accuracy of his assertion, 
" that he never did nothing ;" but every one, who 
is solicitous for his fame, will be tempted to wish 
that he had never done so much. Perpetual efforts 
to please are possible ; perpetual success is not. — 
The teeming earth is impoverished by too copi- 
ous production, and requires to lie fallow till it 
recover its former vigour and fecundity ; the mind 
too demands those intervals of rest, during which 
it may acquire fresh power to throw forth, and 
fresh materials for combination. The writer, who 
is more desirous to shew his fertility than his 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 491 

strength amuses his imagination with a fanciful 
rather than a real value ; as a man may be pro- 
nounced numerically richer who has a hundred 
pounds in sixpences, than he who has thrice the 
actual worth in one solid wedge of gold. It is not 
by diffusing our powers that we give them the 
strongest operation, though we do the widest; 
concentrated energies produce the greatest and 
the most permanent effects. 

Had Cumberland been duly aware of this truth, 
(and a most important one it is to every author 
who hopes to labour for immortality), he would 
have had less occasion to boast the ceaseless rapi- 
dity with which he wrote, and less, perhaps, to 
claim from the indulgence of criticism. It is a 
mortifying panegyric to admit the merits of an in- 
dividual, with the qualifying clause, that he has 
done well, considering he has done so much. 

I have been led into these observations from con- 
sidering the Impostors, a comedy, which Cumber- 
land produced in 1789, aad the plot of which has 
some general resemblance to that of the Beaux 
Stratagem. But there all resemblance ceases. 
The dialogue is dull and insipid, the characters 
either vapid or preposterous, and the language 
destitute of all animation. Nature is violated 
in every scene ; and in none more than where 
Eleanor avows her love for Sir Charles Free- 
mantle. Let the reader imagine the absurdity of 
a young lady being rescued in the morning from 



492 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the peril of an unruly horse, by a stranger to whom 
she very kindly gives her hand in marriage before 
night. 

Quodcunque ostendis mi'hi sic, incredulus odi. 

Eleanor seems to have been formed upon 
Wycherly's Country Girl, or rather Country Wife, 
for Garrick gave it the present name when he 
altered and adapted it for representation ; but in- 
stead of artlessness and simplicity, instead of the 
amusing sincerity of unsuspecting innocence, she 
has nothing but rustic coarseness at first, and flip- 
pant openness afterwards. She is, in every thing, 
inconsistent, and to waste more notice upon her 
would be inconsistency in me. 

The general character of this play, indeed, is dull- 
ness in the incidents, imbecility in the dialogue, 
and extravagance in the characters. I have never 
heard its success ; and I should unwillingly believe 
that it had any. 

About the same time that the Impostors appeared, 
Cumberland attempted a new species of writing, 
and produced his novel of Arundel. This degraded 
branch of composition few men of talent are will- 
ing to cultivate, because they fear to be confounded 
with that herd of scribblers whose effusions of 
folly or obscenity rank under the general denomi- 
nation of novels. Yet, while such an abuse of 
fiction is to be lamented, the philosopher and the 
moralist see, by one intuitive glance of thought, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 493 

how noble and powerful an instrument is remain- 
ing inert and unoperative, because its name is 
vileness, and its uses, hitherto, have been too often 
foolish, or disgraceful. Some of our greatest men, 
however, have not disdained to employ imagi- 
nary narratives, as vehicles for conveying to the 
world their opinions upon life ; and the practice 
of such writers as Sir Thomas More, of Bacon, of 
Harrington, Swift, Johnson, and Voltaire, not to 
mention those who have written works of fiction 
for less exalted purposes, might dignify any thing 
beyond the power of subsequent depreciation. 
An epic is, in modern times, a thing no less de- 
graded than a novel ; yet, were there now a man 
living, with genius capable of success, would he 
hesitate to tread in the steps of Homer, Virgil, 
Tasso, Camoens, and Milton, because inferior 
writers have prostituted the appellation ? 

I rejoice that Cumberland was influenced by 
no such motives, or we had never seen Arun~ 
del, and I had lost one pleasure, which is more 
than man can afford to lose, I consider this novel 
as entitled to hold a very distinguished place, and 
as a production possessing a more than usual por- 
tion of fancy, elegance, and interest. It was writ- 
ten under some disadvantages while Cumberland 
was at Brighthelmstone, and sent to the press as 
fast as it was composed. He seems, however, to 
have had an accurate notion of its merits, and de« 
clares that notion without much reserve. 



494 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

The character of Arundel is drawn with a degree 
of chivalrous refinement and loftiness of honour, 
which, without carrying him beyond nature, makes 
him such a being as we behold with delight, and 
long to imitate. His dignity of feeling never de- 
generates into arrogance, nor his graceful and be- 
coming pride into haughtiness. His conduct is 
that of a perfect gentleman, undebased by any 
affectation. 

His introduction into the family of Lord G. 
coincides, in some particulars, so strongly with 
Cumberland's own introduction into the family of 
Lord Halifax, that, as I have already observed, it 
always appeared to me intended to allude to that 
circumstance. I do not, indeed, mean to infer 
that Cumberland was an Arundel^ for the resem- 
blance soon ceases ; but in all those regrets which 
Arundel pours forth, at being torn from his college 
solitude, from his favourite studies, and from his 
academical friends, to submit to political duties, 
and to the unvarying ones of a secretary's office, 
I think Cumberland intended an adumbration of 
his own early condition. This idea is strength- 
ened in me, too, when I remember that he owed 
his promotion to his father's services during an 
election, and that Arundel is patronised by Lord 
G. for the very same reason. (See Letter H). 

But, whatever affinity there may be between 
Arundel and Cumberland, there is none between 
the father of Arundel and his own venerable sire ; 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 495 

nor can I conjecture why he delighted to draw that 
character with such qualities as could excite only 
unmingled detestation. The reader hardly believes 
that such a son as Arundel could have sprung 
from so degenerate a stock, and the contrast, so far 
from heightening the virtues of the descendant, 
tends rather to diminish our admiration of them, 
from the operation of that prejudice so common in 
life, by which we extend, more or less, the ignominy 
of a single member to all the branches of a family. 
There seems to have been no sufficient motive for 
assigning to Dr. Arundel so much meanness ; it has 
no influence upon the narrative, and might, there- 
fore, have been spared with great advantage to 
the reader's feelings. 

In the character of Lady G. Cumberland has 
certainly " set virtue upon ice/' to use his own 
words ; but so far from falling, I hardly think that 
she slips. Her husband treats her with scorn, 
and she indemnifies herself for his neglect, in the 
respectful and consoling attentions of another. 
These attentions lead to nothing that is criminal, 
and shall it be denied to a wounded heart to repose 
upon the bosom that would shelter, but which 
harbours no thought that would wrong it ? In the 
letters of the Honourable Mrs. Dormer to Lady G. 
there are many arguments justificatory of her 
friend's conduct, and which, whether Cumberland 
meant them to be so, or not, are absolutely unan- 
swerable. 



496 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

But as much cannot be said, perhaps, of those 
which Arundel employs in defence of duelling, and 
which are derived rather from the practice itself, 
than from any abstract consideration of its neces- 
sity and propriety. In the person of Arundel, 
Cumberland employs that mode of reasoning 
which men, who adopt the system, must always 
use in their own vindication, nor will I deny 
that it is plausible, and apparently conclusive ; 
but, the reply of Mortlake embraces the more ra- 
tional view of the question ; and though it may be 
true that the world will act with Arundel, while 
they think with his friend, nothing more is proved 
by the fact, than that error is more powerful than 
truth. The subject is one, however, that has been, 
amply discussed, and little can be said upon it 
which has not been said already. It has had its' 
opponents and defenders, nor does it appear 
that the practice has been much influenced by 
either. Attempts have been made, in some coun- 
tries, to supercede the supposed necessity of duel- 
ing by the institution of a court of honour, to 
which individuals should be amenable for those 
offences that are now beyond the cognizance of law ; 
but there was so little that could be definitely 
ascertained, so little of positive injury that could be 
established, in actions which operated on theimagi* 
nation rather than on the reason, and so difficult it 
proved to apportion punishments for misdemea- 
nors, where so much depended upon local and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 497 

temporary circumstances, that the schemes have 
generally failed. In France, such a plan was once 
matured* and reduced to practice, by the Marquis 
of Fenelon, uncle to the archbishop of Cambrai; 
but though supported by Louis XIV. by the prince 
of Conde, and by most of the great generals of 
the age, men whose motives nobody could sus- 
pect, the undertaking languished only for a short 
time, and gradually sunk into oblivion. 

It is but justice* however, to say, that Cum- 
berland has advanced more plausible arguments in 
defence of this practice^ than any that I have else- 
where met with. They have a shew of solidity in 
them, and in some respects an actual authority, 
arising from the want of any other legitimate and 
acknowledged mode of redress for particular in- 
sults. Yet I would hope something as conclusive 
might be urged in support of a dignified forbear- 
ance ; at least I thought so, when I wrote the fol- 
lowing paragraph in Nubilia. 

" It is to be regretted/ ' I have there observed^ 
" that the invention of man has yet discovered no 
milder composition for offence than the destruc- 
tion of life, or at least the risk of that destruction ; 
and especially when we consider the insignificance 
of the causes that too frequently lead to the dis- 
graceful practice of duelling. I do not know how 
a man, who is a father, a husband, a son, or a bro- 
ther, acquits himself to his own conscience when 
he enters the field for such a purpose : nor, if his 
2K 



49S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

antagonist fall, how he soothes that conscience into 
the belief that he has not committed murder. The 
plea of personal defence is futile ; for in this coun- 
try personal safety is not so wholly at the mercy 
of individual rancour. There are laws, and vi- 
gorous ones, if we choose to fly to them. As to 
the justification of honour, I tremble to think how 
that will avail them at the judgment seat of God. 
For, what is this honour ? Its most bigotted fol- 
lowers cannot solve the question. They will tell 
you, that if they do not challenge, or accept a chal- 
lenge, under certain circumstances, they will not 
be held as men of honour; that is, they will be 
disowned by a few profligate, vain, and immoral 
beings, for whose good opinion they are to risk 
their life. What an absurdity ! Why, it is an 
emancipation— it is a freedom — it is a glorious li- 
berty, to throw off the yoke of their opinion. No 
good, no wise, no virtuous man* will despise them ; 
and, what is of infinitely greater importance, their 
God will not despise them. 

" If I am challenged I have but two things to 
consider : have I given offence ? have I acted 
wrong ? If I have, it becomes me, as a rational 
being, and it is my duty as a christian, to acknow- 
ledge my offence, and to repair the wrong I have 
committed. If he, whom I have offended or in- 
jured, be not satisfied with this, I have no more to 
do : I have done towards him all that would be 
required of me by my Creator ; and shall I dare to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 499 

shed my blood, to appease man's proud and in- 
temperate passions ? On the other hand, if I am 
offended or injured, let me, if I can, practise the 
sublime virtue of forgiveness ; if I cannot, let me 
demand that concession which I feel I would my- 
self make; if this be denied, let me not seek for 
blood. These should be the arguments of a wise 
man ; these should be the reflections of a christian. 
Is it the part of wisdom to ascertain guilt or inno- 
cence by an ordeal scarcely less absurd than the 
burning plough-shares ? No matter how much I 
am in the wrong ; if I have more skill than my 
adversary, or if a lucky chance should aid me, and 
I wound or kill him, I am immediately transformed 
into a man of honour ! Nay, if w T e both retire 
without any personal injury, provided we have, 
each of us, fired off a loaded pistol, why then we 
are both men of honour ! What a despicable so- 
phistry it is I'* 

What my opinion was when I wrote this, it still 
is : I still think that a man might reject a chal- 
lenge upon such motives, which, if distinctly, 
calmly, and fearlessly avowed, would secure him 
from every imputation on his honour, except, per- 
haps, among those whose opinions it is no honour 
to value.— -I now return to Arundel. 

The character of Lady Louisa G. is drawn in 
glowing colours. She has much of that sensibility, 
nobleness, and candour, of that ardent fire of 
youth, and that fervent enthusiasm of love, which 

2 K 2 



500 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Rousseau has given to Heloise. She is sprightly 
and enthusiastic ; above disguise and above vice. 
She trembles once, indeed, upon the brink of it, 
when she offers to elope with Arundel ; but even 
then she preserves the esteem of the reader, from 
the ingenuousness with which she acts, and the 
motives that influence her. 

Her friend and companion, Lady Jane S. has 
equal sensibility of heart, with somewhat more 
solidity of mind. Her playful vivacity and arch- 
ness of raillery are very pleasingly exhibited, and 
the energy of virtue with which she dismisses her 
brother to the field of battle is highly interesting. 
I could wish, however, that Cumberland had made 
her less communicative upon her love for Mort- 
lake. The description of their amorous moments, 
of their solitary rambles, when passion sometimes 
mastered prudence, and when the future husband 
dwelt with ardour upon joys to come, of all their 
little anticipations of expected bliss, and all the fond 
murmurings of requited affection, are topics which a 
woman should hardly expatiate upon even to a wo- 
man. With all Lady Jane's imputed frankness of 
character, I cannot but deem this display of it be- 
yond the limits of female propriety. 

In Captain John Arundel, Cumberland has 
very successfully depicted a frank, rough, and 
manly sea-officer, a character in which he totally 
failed in his comedy of The Brothers. He has 
done this too without any profusion of technical 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 501 

language, like Smollett, to which, indeed, I should 
not suppose him adequate. He has preserved all 
the spirit of the resemblance, without copying its 
blemishes. 

Mortlake is a very interesting personage. Less 
ardent, less enthusiastic than Arundel^ he has 
more sobriety of judgment, and more piety of con- 
duct. The moderation of his wishes makes him 
worthy of the prosperity he encounters, and the 
humility with which he receives it is a pleasing as* 
surance that he will not abuse it, 

I question if any writer ever disposed of his cha* 
racters at the conclusion of a work, in a manner 
that more completely satisfies the reader, than Cum- 
berland has done in this novel. The union of the 
two friends with their respective mistresses, who 
are also the friends of each other, their residence 
in the same neighbourhood, and their mutual af- 
fection, present such a picture of conjugal and 
domestic felicity, that the mind reposes upon the 
most pleasing association of ideas, while there is 
such an air of probability pervades the whole, that 
we are hardly conscious of the fiction. 

The passion of love is exhibited in this work 
with nearer approaches to reality than has been 
done by any of our novel writers, if Richardson 
perhaps be excepted. In Fielding it is combined 
with too much pedantry, and in Smollett with too 
much licentiousness. The antiquated raptures of 
the heroes of former times, though probably nof 



502 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

wholly unlike the practice of the age in which the 
authors lived, have very little in them to attract a 
modern reader. Their adoring rants, or their un- 
awed boldness, disgust rather than amuse : while 
their affectation of ceremonious courtesy provokes 
only ridicule. They have no love 2 they have only 
gallantry: < c qui ri est point I 'amour" says Montes- 
quieu*, " mais le delicate mais le leger, mais le 
perpetuel mensonge de I s amour." 

Cumberland has certainly avoided this frigid 
counterfeit in ArundeL He has given to the most 
endearing, the most powerful, and the most ele- 
vated passion of the human heart, all that dignity, 
fervour, and elegance, which truly belong to it, 
but which as few are capable of feeling as of de- 
scribing. Nor does he deviate into the other ex- 
treme of romantic extravagance. He has happily 
caught the graceful medium, and displayed a pic- 
ture the most agreeable and fascinating of any 
novelist in the language. 

I deliver this opinion at some peril, for my ac- 
quaintance with English novels, except with those 
which are admitted into every library for their ex- 
cellence, is very limited. They are books into which 
I seldom look, unless recommended by some one in 
whose judgment I can securely confide : nor had I 
read even Cumberland's novels till my present un- 
dertaking rendered it necessary. Perhaps, therefore, 

* Esprit des Loix. Tom. III. liv. xxviii. ch. 22. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 503 

there may be others qualified to dispute this pecu- 
liar praise which I have bestowed upon Arundel. 

I wish, however, that Cumberland had always 
regulated his imagination with the same sobriety 
that he exercised in his Observer. There are some 
parts of this work which, though not obscene, are 
certainly indelicate, if not indecent. I shall not 
specify them, for it would only serve as an index 
to what might better be expunged ; but Cumber- 
land knew the transgression, and endeavoured to 
mitigate it in an advertisement prefixed to the third 
edition of the book. His justification, however, 
is but the last resource of a man who will not plead 
guilty, and must therefore say something. 

" Let them reflect," he observes, " upon the 
habits of an author, who has been long in the 
practice of writing for the stage, which is a pro- 
vince of the art that naturally requires a strong 
cast of characters, and a striking relief of light and 
shade. Accustomed to compress his energies 
within a stated compass, the dramatic writer must 
not let his fable slumber, or his language creep : 
that tantalizing and minute precision in developing 
the passions, which the French novelists are so 
expert in, he will neither have the leisure, nor 
perhaps the talents, to pursue ; and in his hand 
the pencil, whether it traces the adventures of a 
novel, or the incidents of a play, will colour highly, 
without attention to those fine and delicate grada- 



504 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tions, that a more laborious finisher would be stu- 
dious to excel in." 

What vindication there is in this paragraph, I 
will leave the reader to discover. Some such so- 
phistry might be urged in defence of any delin- 
quency. A thief-taker might commit a robbery, 
and afterwards plead in extenuation, that he had 
been so long accustomed, in his profession, to all 
the details of stealing, that some excuse must be 
made for him. But Cumberland's appeal is refuted 
by his own practice. In his plays he rarely tres- 
passes upon decency : why then in his novels ? — 
Because the act could not be censured with that 
immediate disapprobation which is exercised in a 
theatre when the audience is displeased. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 505 



CHAP. XXIII, 

Emboldened by the success of Arundel, Cum- 
berland writes his novel of Henry. — His adver- 
tisement to it. — Borrows the initial chapters from 
Fielding. — The characters examined. — Susan 
May, a mere wanton. — Severe censure of Cum- 
berland for his indelicacy. — Possessed no powers 
of humour. — Exemplified. — A minute examina* 
tion of the characters, sentiments, and incidents 
of this novel. — Cumberland very successful in 
delineating the pdssion of love. — Brief account 
of John de Lancaster. — Inferior both to 
Arundel awe? Henry. 

Emboldened by the success of Arundel, Cum- 
berland sat down to the composition of Henry, a 
work more extensive in its scope, and apparently 
laboured with more assiduity. The incidents are 
more numerous, the characters more contrasted 
and developed, and the whole work is evidently 
the result of a belief that the author was qualified 
to contest, with the highest names in our language, 
for the palm of supremacy in the construction of a 
novel. The existence of this belief is, to me, 
sufficiently manifested in the short Advertisement 
to the Reader. Cumberland did not usually as- 
sume a lofty tone, though he was never without a 



506 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

due consciousness of his own merits : but in the 
following paragraph he talks with the confidence 
of a man who exacts, rather than solicits, appro- 
bation. 

" It is a custom," says he, " with some authors, 
to introduce their works by a prefatory appeal to 
the candour of the reader, and circumstances may 
undoubtedly combine to justify the measure ; but 
when a man acts from his own free motives in re- 
sorting to the press, how can he be warranted for 
intruding on the public without a proper confi- 
dence in his powers for entertaining them ? True 
respect to the reader refers itself to his judgment, 
and makes no attempts upon his pity. The pur- 
chaser of these volumes would have just reason to 
complain of his bargain, if he were to find nothing 
in them but a sample of my modesty in the pre- 
face, and a long dull story at the end of it ; and I 
should only prove that I thought more meanly of 
his taste than of my own talents, were I to presume 
that he could be well pleased with a production of 
which my own opinion was so very humble, as to 
stand in need of an apology for presenting it to 
him. I therefore hold it as fair dealing to premise, 
that if these volumes do not merit his approbation, 
they have small claim upon his candour, forasmuch 
as they have been carefully and deliberately writ- 
ten, some years having passed since the first hand 
was put to them; during which no diligence has 
been spared to make them worthy, both in style 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 507 

and matter, of that generous public, who are so 
justly entitled to every grateful exertion on my 
part, and to whose future favours it is my best am- 
bition to aspire." 

There is an amusing mixture of diffidence and 
presumption in this address. The author thinks 
he has no right to insult the public by doubting 
the merit of his offering: and yet he makes an ap- 
peal to their generosity. Justice, however, was 
all he should have loftily demanded, secure in his 
right to it. It is only the feeble and the erring 
who need ask from generosity what they cannot 
hope from equity. 

The novel of Henry bears internal evidence of 
having been " carefully and deliberately written," 
though it is doubtful whether its excellence be in 
proportion to that care and deliberation. Assidu- 
ous application may sometimes bestow upon a pro- 
duction a cold freedom from error, without giving 
it that vigorous animation which works of imagi- 
nation frequently derive from a lucky rapidity of 
execution. That which is glowingly struck off 
" at a heat," (to use the phrase employed by Dry- 
den in characterizing the celerity with which he 
composed his matchless ode,) possesses commonly 
a fervour of execution which more than redeems 
those minute inaccuracies that patient labour might 
have escaped. 

Cumberland has borrowed, in this work, the 
initial chapters from Fielding; and he has bor- 



3QS LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

rowed them only to disfigure his production. In 
Fielding himself, they have always appeared to me 
as blemishes : they interrupt the course of the nar- 
ration, and give an air of pedantry to the whole. 

But Cumberland, who wanted humour to make 
them tolerable, seems to have adopted the prac- 
tice only because it was Fielding's, and because 
they supplied him with opportunities of talking 
about himself and his opinions. Sometimes, in- 
deed, he has made them injudiciously subservient 
to the anticipation of the story, by telling the reader 
what the subsequent book is to contain. 

What may be called the action or fable of this 
novel, is contrived with considerable ingenuity; 
and it was to this skilful concatenation of the in- 
cidents, I suppose, that Cumberland devoted that 
care and deliberation he so emphatically announces 
in his advertisement. In Arundel there is very 
little plot, but a great deal of sentiment. Here 
there is much bustle and intrigue, and little senti- 
ment. 

It must be acknowledged, however, that the 
interest of the narrative is so equably maintained, 
that it never slumbers in the imagination. An 
agreeable degree of suspense is excited from the 
first to the last, and such a diversity of incidents 
is embraced in the work, that as soon as one event 
is dismissed, another is brought forward to provoke 
attention. 

The hero is introduced to the reader's notice in 



LIFfc OF CUMBERLAND. 509 

a manner very unlike the ordinary plan of ordi- 
nary writers, and truly illustrative of the precept 
of Horace : 

Nonfumum exfidgore, sed exfumo dare lucem. 

He appears upon the lowest step of human life, 
and gradually ascends to the highest, by a course 
of events, all of which are transacted under our 
inspection. 

One striking defect, however, in the manage- 
ment of the story, is the discloure oi Henry's birth 
to the reader, while it still remains a mystery to 
himself; and the consequence of w r hich is, that 
we have no longer any sympathy with those hopes 
and fears that agitate his bosom as often as his ori- 
gin becomes the object of his thoughts. 

Henry , however, is a very interesting cha- 
racter. He has, of course, all those attributes be- 
stowed upon him which are to be found rather in 
the writer's fancy than in the scenes of actual life, 
as concentered in one person ; but as they are ju- 
diciously brought into action, no extraordinary 
occasions being invented merely for the display of 
extraordinary virtues, their exhibition in him 
awakens only a pleasing enthusiasm in the mind, 
a generous desire, and wish, that we knew such a 
man among our own friends or acquaintance. 

Susan May is a mere wanton, decorated with 
more alluring colours than anv author should have 
employed who wishes not to confound the distinc- 



$\0 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tions between vice and virtue. I have said, at 
p. 443 of this volume, that Cumberland, in some 
of his writings, " needed only to employ a cor- 
responding licentiousness of expression to rank 
with the corrupters of public morals ;" and it was 
chiefly in allusion to some of the scenes between 
Henri/ and Susan that I delivered so severe an opi- 
nion. Every reader of Henry, however, will tes- 
tify its truth ; and I am sorry that it is so. The 
licentiousness of Fielding and Smollett has been 
justly inveighed against ; but Cumberland exceeds 
them both. He seems to have delighted in a stu- 
died and insidious embellishment of ideas and si- 
tuations, which, by being robbed of some of their 
grossness, become so much the more dangerous : 
and he has laboured to invest the person, who is 
most immoral in these scenes, with a general love- 
liness of character, a softness, benevolence, and 
sensibility of heart, which wins upon our affections, 
and soothes our reason into acquiescence. Susan 
May is, indeed, the most interesting female in the 
work ; not perhaps the most guilty, for Fanny 
Claypole is made to share that pre-eminence with 
her; but she unites to her libidinous appetites 
other qualities of so disgusting a character, that we 
feelonlyunmingleddetestation,while^2/6rtwis hardly 
hated even when the full extent of her criminality 
is developed before us. This perversion of the 
power of fiction is, perhaps, one of the most dan- 
gerous that can be employed ; for while it can be 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 511 

believed that wanton profligacy may exist in con- 
junction with every virtue but its own opposite, 
many will be found to practise the vice, who have 
no other claims to the endearing moral qualities, 
but what are to be found in the illusions of their 
own bosoms. 

It will not be necessary to examine this novel 
with much minuteness. Its copiousness of cha- 
racter and incident, indeed, would render such an 
undertaking tediously prolix. I shall dismiss it, 
therefore, with a few general observations upon 
particular parts. 

Cumberland had no powers of humour, and as 
often as he attempt it, so often he inevitably 
fails. In Henry he has frequently sought to imU 
tate the quaintness of Fielding, but the endeavour 
always leads to disappointment. "Where can be 
found more pedantry and affectation, for example, 
than in the following paragraph from the first 
chapter? 

" There is a voice, a look, a tone* in truth and 
innocence, which holds a sympathy with the hearts 
of those, on whom their evidences light, irresist- 
ibly impressive . What honest Zachary wore in 
his bosom, under his left ribs, was fairly made by 
nature of real flesh and blood, and not of flint or 
adamant, or any such impenetrable substance as 
she sometimes puts in the place of better work- 
manship and softer materials, whereby the owners 
become, as it were, casemated and bomb proof 



512 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

against all besiegers, of which number pity and 
compassion, though in appearance the most gen- 
tle, are in fact among the most importunate and 
persevering; insomuch that the said Zachary had no 
sooner heard these words* and reconnoitered the 
signs and symbols of truth and innocence, which 
accompanied them, than he felt something like a 
string or chord vibrating and tingling in the aforesaid 
region under his ribs, which running along the ducts 
and channels that communicated with his tongue, 
put that little member into motion, and produced 
the following words:" — 

Surely this is beneath contempt; but if the au- 
thor thought it humour, who, that could have pa- 
tience to write so, might not produce volumes of 
humour ? The reader will remember also* that 
Henry is coupled with the Observer^ by Cumberland, 
as one of those works in which his harmony and 
perspicuity of style was so conspicuous : let him 
therefore examine the preceding paragraph, and 
when he has enumerated the insomuches and the 
whereby % with which its several clauses are con- 
nected ; when he has observed that the whole is 
but one period, and that the idea is confusedly 
protracted from member to member, then let hi in 
decide in which part of it harmony or clearness is 
most distinctly visible. 

Let me, indeed, finally declare, that no man ever 
formed a notion more erroneous than Cumberland 
did, when he believed that he had written a style 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5\3 

of such excellence in his Observer and in this work. 
Were it necessary to my purpose I could produce 
innumerable instances to disprove this belief: in- 
stances more numerous than any reader would 
have patience to peruse. My own opinion is, that 
his diction is remarkable for obscurity, and I have 
often hopelessly relinquished all attempts to detect 
his meaning beneath the cumbrous weight of words 
and the perplexing involution of sentences with 
which he has oppressed it. I would be understood 
to say this, however, only of his Observer and of 
Henry. In his plays, and in Arundel, his diction is 
very often elegant, harmonious, and perspicuous. 

I will exhibit one more instance of Cumberland's 
abortive efforts to be humorous. The following is 
the description of Zacharys immersion in a mill 
pond, in consequence of his horse being frightened 
by the clamour of a duck. 

" The duck, who had a friend at home, took her 
flight towards the mill, vociferating most incon- 
tinently by the way, till she had called out the 
miller's dog, who sallied forth in her defence with 
all possible alacrity, bristling every hair with ardour 
for revenge, and rushing to the ford, where the 
flouncing and dashing of the waters directed him to 
the scene of action. Without a moment's hesi- 
tation, this amphibious animal plunged into the 
stream, at the very moment when Zachary's fate 
hung upon the balance, and the nymph of the 
brook was preparing to receive him in her arms. 

2L 



514 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

His head, according the principles of action and 
re-action of elastic bodies, had taken a tour through 
the segment of a parabola, and was now in its de- 
clination towards the crupper of old Betty, when 
the avenger of the duck seized the skirt of his 
coat, and spite of all impediments, which staytape 
and buckram could oppose to his gripe, took so 
fast a hold, and gave the luckless accoucheur so 
hearty a tug in the crisis of vacillation, that he 
came backwards into the pool, and terrible was 
the fall thereof/' 

I commit this to the reader's judgment. If he 
can possibly require conviction of its futility, no 
arguments of mine can reach him. 

Cumberland seldom succeeds when he has to 
frame a diction for characters in low life ; he had 
seen little of it, and knew nothing of its peculiarities 
of manner and language. Hence the deficiency 
in such scenes in Henry, and hence the excellence 
of Arundel, the incidents of which being uniformly 
placed in elevated society, the ideas and phrase- 
ology are elegantly appropriate. 

A disregard of probability in producing events, 
is the common reproach of novel writers, and Cum- 
berland is not free from it. Fielding was usually 
very scrupulous in avoiding this fault, especially 
in Tom Jones, though even he sometimes committed 
it; butCumberland never hesitates, whenever there 
is occasion, to produce a most miraculous concur- 
rence of circumstances, very useful to himself, but 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 615 

very offensive to his readers. Such is the meeting 
between Henry and Delapoer at sea, and the in- 
troduction of Bowsey at the same time. 

From Fielding, who was his model, he has bor- 
rowed many defects. Among others we find in 
him that universal ascription of all excellence to 
his characters when the existence of that excel- 
lence is requisite for the occasion. The finest ; 
the bravest, the noblest, the most generous, the 
most elegant, the most graceful, &c. are epithets 
lavished with so little discrimination that they 
become at last ridiculous. They are attributes 
which the author never seems to bestow till some 
occurrence happens in which they must be asserted 
or the plot deranged. 

In supporting the consistency of his characters 
Cumberland often fails. Jemima and Susan both 
speak a language, occasionally, which might be 
uttered in the senate without impropriety: but 
neither Susan nor Jemima are presumed to have 
had that education, or to have moved in that sphere 
of life which could qualify them for such elegance 
of diction. The one is a rural wanton, and the 
other a bestial drunkard. 

There is one excellence which I think belongs 
peculiarly to Cumberland, and that is in support- 
ing a scene of courtly and refined altercation. I 
know no writer who can be compared to him in 
this respect. If he had to exhibit a quarrel be- 
tween two porters he would infallibly display only 

2 L 2 



516 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

an impotent endeavour to succeed : but when he 
represents two gentlemen contentiously engaged he 
gives them at once, dignity, acrimony, and a chi- 
valrous tone of sentiment supported by an exquisite 
felicity of style. His plays have many scenes that 
support this opinion : and the tenth chapter of 
the fourth book of Henry, is an admirable instance 
of this power which he possessed. 

Cumberland excels, also, both Fielding and 
Smollett, and sometimes even Richardson, in his 
descriptions of female grace and beauty. Fielding 
and Smollett describe their women like voluptua- 
ries ; Cumberland like a lover. In them wefind only 
the common enumeration of charms which may 
inflame desire, in Cumberland such as may awaken 
sentiment and respectful feeling, for he usually 
combines them with some moral excellence of 
which they are made only the visible effects or 
the pleasing associates. He utters no hyperbolical 
raptures at the imaginary contemplation of his 
females, nor exalts them to divinities by giving 
them charms which mere mortals never possessed : 
he soberly and dispassionately celebrates such cor* 
poreal qualities as may be found in any accidental 
assemblage of the sex, and which, having all the 
weight of truth, they please as beauties but do not 
strike as wonders. 

In the character of Ezekiel Daw, Cumberland 
made a fresh exertion of his benevolence, and 
strove to excite the reader's good will for an itine- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 517 

rant methodist preacher ; an individual whom it 
has long been the custom to regard with a mixture 
of ridicule and contempt. By giving him active 
and essential piety, by making him humane, zea- 
lous in doing good, and respectable in conduct, he 
has certainly succeeded in displaying one methodist 
whom it is possible to esteem. His quotations 
from scripture are copious and appropriate : but I 
am afraid they are sometimes irreverent. 

Lady Crowbery is a very pleasingly drawn. Her 
husband is a wretch whose end no one pities. 
Isabella, as the heroine of the tale, has received 
all the author's most elaborate touches and is, in 
many parts, pourtrayed with great felicity. But her 
filial piety exalts her moral character I fear beyond 
what it is capable of attaining when attained in 
opposition to vehement and resistless love. She has 
many fascinating qualities, though I should not 
think her so dangerous to the peace of an admirer as 
Lady Louisa G. or her friend Lady Jane in Arundel. 

Of Zachary Cawdle I probably think less fa- 
vourably than the author, for he says, in his Me- 
moivs, that he drew him con amove. He is only 
one of a species : he will never constitute a dis- 
tinct genus. He sometimes amuses, but when he 
does, it is rather by exaggeration than by any dis- 
play of nature. His wife, Jemima, might have 
been omitted, and the narrative had proceeded just 
as regularly. If she was introduced only to shew 



518 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

that faith without good works, is merely a holy 
cheat, a sanctimonious covering to hide innate de- 
pravity and to cloke the basest actions, the labour 
was superfluous. Every one knew that who knew 
how to join two propositions. 

Fanny Claypole is drawn with some skill. The 
unbridled fury of her passions leads her, on all 
occasions, to violent excesses, and whether she 
loves or hates she is equally the object of our 
terror and aversion. Her father is another in- 
stance of Cumberland's willingness to degrade the 
established clergy by every meanness that can sully 
without destroying the man. Like Joseph Arundel^ 
he is a despicable sycophant, who fawns, crawls, 
and licks the dust to obtain some paltry, mercenary 
end. But is it necessary, is it prudent or patriotic, 
to exhibit such vices in the character of a clergy- 
man ? I do not say they are not to be found in the 
members of the church: but when it is considered 
how potent opinion is and how much of our re- 
verence for the most sacred institutions is founded 
upon that frail and fickle basis, it may be justly 
questioned whether much political evil may not 
eventually result from the too great freedom of 
satire in holding up the established ministers of 
religion to insult and derision. AYithout being 
fastidious, also, I may be permitted to hint that 
such willingness to this kind of freedom is some- 
what remarkable in the son and great-grandson of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 519 

a bishop, and in a man who often employed his 
pen to combat the enemies of the church, or to 
promote the duties of its members. 

The episode of Blackford is well conducted, 
and is made subservient to a moral purpose. 
Henry, also, is displayed to great advantage in his 
conduct on the occasion. He does not do more, in- 
deed, than many, i t is to be hoped,would have done ; 
but what he does is so much beyond the reach of 
common integrity that the display of it seems to 
give a nevvimpulse to virtue. 

Cumberland appears to have been aware of his 
superiority in depicting the passion of love. In 
the initial chapter to the first book he says, " one 
thing however, there is for me to do, that cannot 
be dispensed with though I shall probably hold it 
off as long as I can. I must make love, and I am 
far from sure, I shall make it in a style to please 
my readers. I wish to my heart I knew what 
sort of love they best like ; for there are so many 
patterns, I am puzzled how to choose what may 
please them. I have been sometimes told that the 
author of Arundel was not far from the butt: if so, 
I hope I am as good a marksman as he is/' 

This, indeed, is playful raillery, but truth is at 
the bottom : and Cumberland might confidently 
have assumed to himself that excellence which he 
seems only to surmise. Yet, he could sometimes 
degenerate into rant, as when a gentleman ex- 
claims, who is listening to Isabella^ " What voice 



,520 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

do I hear ? What vision do I behold ? She 
breathes through rows of pearls over beds of roses. 
'Tis an enchantment ! She will vanish presently, 
and I shall start out of ray trance/' 

Surely the author was in a trance when he wrote 
such unnatural bombast. He rarely, however, 
offends in this way. 

Cumberland's opinion, as to his excellence of 
style, was settled long before he wrote his Me- 
moirs. In the first chapter of the twelfth book of 
Henri/, he hints that the critic will not find much 
to reprehend in his diction, but begs, that if a blow 
be struck, it may be struck with justice. It would 
be idle repetition to dispute this opinion with the 
same minuteness as I have done in the Observer; 
the reader must candidly believe my power to do 
it, or remove his doubts by looking into the vo- 
lumes himself. I will only instance one error. 
The ninth chapter of the last book has this inter- 
rogatory at the head of it, 

" Why is earth and ashes proud?'* 

In dismissing this novel from my notice, I would 
finally observe, that it is one which must always 
be read with pleasure; that the contexture of the 
fable is artfully woven ; that the characters are, 
most of them, skilfully drawn ; that the situations 
are often pathetic and interesting ; that the atten- 
tion of the reader is never suffered to lapse into 
indifference, and that the sentiments which it con- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 691 

tains are commonly friendly to virtue and social 
happiness. Its impurities I have already stigma- 
tised : and Cumberland himself does not disdain 
to acknowledge his transgressions in his Memoirs, 
where he says, " if, in my zeal to exhibit virtue 
triumphant over the most tempting allurements, I 
have painted those allurements in too vivid co- 
lours, I am sorry, and ask pardon of all those who 
thought the moral did not heal the mischief." 

Let me anticipate the progress of my narrative 
here, and close this chapter with some brief obser- 
vations upon the last novel that Cumberland wrote, 
his John De Lancaster, in three volumes, and 
published in 1809. This work he announced 
with some degree of pomp in his Memoirs, but 
when it appeared the public received it with cool- 
ness. It was not only inferior to both his preced- 
ing productions, but inferior also, to many similar 
compositions of inferior writers. 

*It deserves, indeed, to be distinguished from 
the common herd of novels, for it has more learn- 
ing than an ordinary novelist can display ; and 
Cumberland seems to have relied upon that learn- 
ing, and upon his name, for its success. 

The plot is very simple, and not very interest- 
ing. Events are too easily anticipated. There is 
no art, no dexterity, in the developement of the 

* Some of the opinions here delivered upon John de Lancaster, are 
copied from an account which I had occasion to give of it, in a periodical 
publication, when it first appeared. I have added a few others upon a recent 
perusal. 



692 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

catastrophe, or in the texture of the incidents. Nor 
is this radical deficiency of fable compensated by 
any elegance of diction, by any elevation of sen- 
timent, or by any accuracy in the delineation of the 
characters. None of them are consistently drawn, 
though several are well sketched. Philip de Lan- 
caster is, perhaps, the best. Robert de Lancaster 
is learned, vapid, and digressive, in the first vo- 
lume ; in the second and third he loses some of 
these qualities, and becomes more natural and 
more interesting. 

I am sorry to find Cumberland, at a much later 
period of his life, again violating decorum in some 
of his descriptions. He does not, indeed, offend 
so much, as in Henry, but he offends more 
than can be justified. There is something pecu- 
liarly disgusting in the indelicacy of an old man. 
The exhausted pruriency of imagination, which it 
betrays, is highly offensive. I will not specify the 
instances that are in my memory, but will dismiss 
the subject with observing, that the entire account 
of the hero's birth is narrated with a studied coarse- 
ness of delineation. 

This work exhibits evident tokens of mental 
decay. In Arundel, and in Henry, the love scenes 
were described with an ardent and impressive glow 
of composition ; but here they are coldly and 
affectedly wrought up. Cumberland knew it. " I 
am ill at these descriptions," says he ; "I confess 
it. Seventy years and seven, with clouds that 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 523 

hang upon my setting sun, will chill the brain, 
that should devise scenes and descriptions warm 
with youthful love/' This is true ; and Cumber- 
land, doubtless, believed the following no less so. 
" Still, the chaste maiden/' he continues, " and the 
prudent wife, shall turn these leaves over with no 
revolting hand, nor blush for having read them." 
To this I answer, that she who can read these vo- 
lumes through, and not blush, or feel cause for 
blushing, has lost all true modesty. Let me not 
be thought fastidiously nice. It is only when a 
man tells me he is immaculate that I am provoked 
to point out the spot which I would else have shut 
my eyes upon ; and I willingly confess that, com- 
pared to some passages in Henry, John de Lan- 
caster is purity itself. Yet, there are certain allu- 
sions in it which no really modest female would 
venture to read aloud in the presence of a man, and 
that is the true test. 

In the phlegmatic character of Philip de Lan- 
caster, Cumberland seems only to have expanded 
the sketch which he gave, in the Observer, of Ned 
Drowsy. 

There is an affecting appeal in the third volume 
to the feelings of the reader. He speaks of the 
death of his grandson, a midshipman, and who, he 
thought, had been the victim of ill-usage. The 
question was referred to some of our tribunals as I 
remember, but their decision did not corroborate 
the opinion of Cumberland. From this subject he 



524 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

makes a transition to his " beloved daughter," to 
whom he dedicated his Memoirs, and to whom he 
also dedicates this work ; " for these repeated tes- 
timonies of my -love," he pathetically adds, " are 
all the inheritance I can bequeath her, all my hard 
fortune hath not wrested from me." 

His diction was not much improved when he 
wrote John de Lancaster. It is often vulgar, 
sometimes ungrammatical, and sometimes obscure. 
His attempts at wit or humour are as unsuccessful 
as in his happiest days of mental vigour. I will 
adduce one instance : 

" We^may literally say, that it (a morning visit) 
was made upon the spur of the occasion, and this 
we hope will be an apology for our introducing 
the baronet in boots." 

It is amusing to see with what unwearied assi- 
duity Cumberland sought to propitiate the critics. 
In the outset of his career he dared them with a 
proud defiance ; but he soon discovered who suf- 
fered most in the contest, and then he strove to 
soothe them by blandishments and courtesy. In 
John de Lancaster he openly solicits them to be- 
friend his book and to promote its sale. "As I know 
some of them," he says, " to be fair and honour- 
able gentlemen, I hope they will recollect how 
often I have been useful to them, in the sale of 
their publications, and assist me now with their 
good word in the circulation of De Lancaster." 

I am afraid this request was not very cordially 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 525 

attended to, or that Cumberland believed them 
to possess a power they do not. His book lan- 
guished to a second edition, and there, I imagine, 
it will remain. It is, in many parts, too erudite for 
the unlearned without being deep enough for the 
learned, and its familiar scenes which might please 
the common reader, want spriteliness and anima- 
tion. The lethargic influence of age seems to have 
impeded his faculties while he wrote; and if he 
wrote from necessity, who but must deplore the 
embarrassments that obscured the closing hours of 
a life so assiduously employed in the labours of 
literature ? 

Necessitas, cujus cursus transversi impetum 
Voluerunt multi effugere, pauci potuerunt, 
Quo me detrusit poene extremis sensibus? 



>26 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 



CHAP. XXIV. 

Cumberland writes the poem of Calvary. — Dr. 
Drake injudiciously endeavours to rank it with 
the Paradise Lost. — Examination of this 
claim, and a further examination of Dr. Drake's 
competency as a critic. — The merits of the poem 
briefly stated. — Cumberland? s account of its com- 
position. — Writes a tract upon Christianity, which 
commences with too much levity; but the other 
parts good. — The conclusion of it extracted for 
its animation. 

Cumberland had now appeared in various de- 
partments of literature, and in most of them with 
success. He had distinguished himself as a dra- 
matist, as an essayist, and as a novelist, and he 
had displayed powers of very respectable quality 
in other paths of exertion. But his ambition led 
him to take a bolder flight, and he attempted the 
arduous composition of an epic poem. Arduous it 
certainly was, in him, for it forced him into imme- 
diate and unavoidable comparison with Milton ; a 
comparison from which few can expect to retire 
but with discomfiture. 

The Calvary of Cumberland is a poem which 
no judicious critic will venture to place on an 
equality, either as a whole, or in any of its parts, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5%J 

with the Paradise Lost of Milton. This is a pre* 
eminence it can never merit, nor ever will obtain. 
A mighty chasm separated the genius of the one 
from the other ; nor do I hesitate to pronounce, 
that the highest flights of Cumberland's muse 
barely excel the lowest of Milton's. I will not 
institute a comparison between them, for it would 
be tacitly acknowledging a parallelism, of whose 
existence I can never be persuaded. I would as 
willingly compare him with Shakspeare as a dra- 
matist, as with Milton as an epic poet. 

In this opinion, however, I differ from a gentle- 
man who has highly praised Cumberland's Cal- 
vary, and whom Cumberland has highly praised 
in return. These are literary courtesies very custo- 
mary, but without any weight in deciding an ab- 
stract point of criticism. 

Dr. Drake, in his Literary Hours, a work quali- 
fied to afford some amusement in a vacant mo- 
ment, has entered upon an elaborate and diffuse 
examination of this poem, and with as much 
solemnity and circumstantial inquiry, as Addison 
bestowed upon the Paradise Lost. He considers 
it under all the usual properties of an epic poem, 
and very gravely pronounces that it is complete in 
its fable, m its characters, and in its sentiments. 
Aristotle himself could not have decided the ques- 
tion with a greater assumption of infallibility. 

Dr. Drake, after some introductory observations 
upon Milton, Klopstock, and Young, whom ha 



,528 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

calls " three divine bards/' though it appears he 
understands nothing of the German poet's divi- 
nity, but what the imperfect glimpses of a transla- 
tion afford, proceeds to inform his readers that 
the " Calvary of Mr. Cumberland is a work imbued 
with the genuine spirit of Milton, and destined, 
therefore, most probably, to immortality/' To 
this induction, indeed, no one will object, who 
admits the premiss, but as I do not admit the pre- 
miss I must be permitted to doubt whether pos- 
terity will know much of Calvary, except as it 
may be remembered among the collected produc- 
tions of the author. 

Encomiastic criticism, however pleasing to a 
candid mind, is not always the positive evidence 
of a strong one. To praise is easy, because it is 
generally received without examination ; and be- 
cause it is less difficult to find pleasure in medio- 
crity, than to shew in what mediocrity consists. 
Whoever has been attentive to the history of mo- 
dern literature, will have observed numerous in- 
stances of boundless panegyric, bestowed, by con- 
temporary writers, upon works which are now 
consigned to merited oblivion. Cumberland is 
not the first who has been told by a good-natured 
friend, or by an incompetent critic, that he wrote 
with air the fire of Milton and Shakspeare ; nor 
is he the last who will find that the voice of kind- 
ness, and the voice of justice, pronounce two dif- 
ferent j udgments. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 52§. 

It is certainly possible, nay, I am willing to 
think it probable, that Dr. Drake believed, and 
does still believe, that the poem of Calvary has in 
it many qualities which entitle it to be compared 
with Paradise Lost. There is nothing extraordi- 
nary in this, because we are familiar with para- 
doxes just as extraordinary. The decisions of 
taste are reducible to no demonstration, and Dr. 
Drake may at least justify his by the example of 
Johnson, who thought Dryden's Ode to Mrs. Anne 
Killigrew, the noblest* that our language has ever 
produced. If, therefore, a critic of Johnson's saga- 
city, could be seduced into an opinion like this, 
why may not Dr. Drake say that Cumberland 
writes like Milton ? 

To say it, however, is not to prove it, and I 
wish Dr. Drake could have done more than say 
it. He does, indeed, attempt to do more, for he 
quotes, with profusion, those passages from Cal- 
vary which he deems not inferior to any in Para- 
dise Lost. Nor is this all. He opposes Cumber- 
land to Milton in parallel cases, where they both, 
exhibit the same character, and he avows that, on. 
some occasions, Cumberland excels Milton. I need 
not tell the reader, that my opinion is contrary to 
this ; and if he requires to have his own settled on 
the same basis, he has nothing to do but to inspect 
the selections of Dr. Drake. I doubt, indeed, if 
any one ever concurred with him in this decision, 
except Cumberland himself. 

I'M 



53Q LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Dr. Drake is fond of figurative language and un- 
meaning epithets. Not contented with elevating 
Cumberland to an equality with Milton, he takes 
another flight, and raises him to a level with 
Shakspeare. " The speeches of the demons, in 
the first book/' says he, " and those of Mammon 
and Iscariot in the second and third, are woven in 
the loom of Shakspeare, and have imbibed much of 
his colouring and spirit/' This is surely too much. 
I am as willing, however, that Cumberland should 
bte the corrivaj of Shakspeare as of Milton ; but I 
am afraid Dr. Drake has unintentionally proved 
the only way in which he can be said to have 
woven in the loom of Shakspeare, by selecting the 
passages which he has adopted, almost literally^ 
from that writer. 

Dr. Drake has devoted nearly a hundred pages 
to the task of proving Cumberland's affinity to 
Milton and Shakspeare, and of displaying his own 
powers as a critic. How successfully he has at- 
tained the first object I have already declared my 
opinion : and I fear he has succeeded no better, in 
the second. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully 
of Dr. Drake, for I have heard that his private 
character is amiable; but I must freely own, that 
I think him wholly incompetent to the office of 
general and abstract criticism. His papers upon 
Cumberland's Calvary are written with that quiet 
mediocrity of talent, with that easy accuracy of 
familiar truths, and with that tone of insipid talk 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 531 

which might be endured by a young man yet new 
to critical disquisition, or by any man with a head 
capable only of reading without thinking. There 
are, in his Literary Hours, however, some pleasing 
tales, sometimes pleasingly told, but they are more 
frequently disfigured by a finical affectation of 
style ; by a diction oppressed and obscured by 
metaphorical confusion, unmeaning epithets, and 
superlative phrases of rapture. 

His papers on Cumberland, however, are not 
without their utility. The selections which he 
has made from Calvary^ though they do not 
prove what they are intended to prove, comprise, 
perhaps, the very best passages in the poem, 
and he who has not read it, but wishes to know r 
by what excellences Cumberland is entitled to be 
regarded as the rival of Milton, may better satisfy 
that curiosity by perusing these concentrated 
efforts of his genius, than by perusing the whole 
poem. 

Calvary is certainly a very pleasing production. 
The versification is harmonious, the images are 
often poetical, and the action is one of unfailing 
interest. A general air of easy elegance pervades 
the whole, an unconstrained fluency of language 
which is very agreeable to the ear, but which 
makes very little impression on the mind. Some 
parts too are laboured into dignity and animation, 
but the reader is always unmoved. He lays down 
the book without a desire to resume it, and when he 

2 M9 



532 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

does resume it, his interest in the narrative is 
never so strong that he is unwilling to quit it. 

This defect may be partly attributed, perhaps, 
to the nature of the subject. No curiosity is ex- 
cited because we know what is to be told ; we are 
familiar with all the principal events, and antici- 
pate the catastrophe. This inherent defect of 
plan could be compensated only by the highest 
efforts of poetry, by the introduction of all those 
striking descriptions, those sublime flights, and 
those exquisite moral touches of sentiment, with 
which Milton has relieved the radical imperfection 
of his fable, but which were wholly beyond the 
attainment of Cumberland. His action proceeds 
with an even tenor of narration ; and the utmost 
effect, which I believe the poem capable of pro- 
ducing, is that of a pleasing apathy of mind, a gen- 
tle acquiescence, undisturbed either by any tumul- 
tuous throes of delight, or by any harsh provoca- 
tions of disgust. 

Such is my opinion of Calvary, delivered from 
unfeigned conviction, and without any anxiety as 
to its reception. They who differ from me may 
probably think it a vain or a foolish one, as I perhaps 
should theirs, if I knew it as explicitly ; Dr. Drake 
must think it so, for he thinks the poem embued 
with the genuine spirit of Milton ;^but as I have 
always been unwilling to form my notions upon 
those of others, without the conviction of my rea- 
son, I shall be contented to bear any interpretation 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5%3>, 

which can be put upon this judgment, till I feel a 
sufficient motive to alter it. 

In the Supplement^ which Cumberland pub- 
lished to his Memoirs , he very naturally takes an 
opportunity of thanking Dr. Drake, whom he 
justly calls his " kind reviewer," for the praises 
he bestowed upon Calvary ; but I believe he con- 
ceded, in the warmth of his judgment, a power to 
that critic's commendation, which no one but the 
object of it will be willing to allow, when he says 
that he obtained for his poem, " a place amongst 
our British Classics/' Let the event decide. 

Cumberland seems to have regarded this work with 
so much affection, and has detailed its origin and 
progress with so much minuteness, that the reader 
would hardly consider me excuseable if I omitted 
to insert the account here : 

" The mental gratification which the exercise of 
fancy, in the act of composition, gives me, has, 
(with the exception only of the task I am at pre- 
sent engaged in), led me to that inordinate con- 
sumption of paper, of which much has been profit- 
less, much unseen, and very much of that which 
has been seen, would have been more worthy of 
the world, had I bestowed more blotting upon it 
before 1 committed it to the press ; yet I am now 
about to mention a poem not the most imper- 
fect of my various productions, of which the first 
manuscript copy was the only one, and that, per- 
haps, the fairest I had ever put out of my hands. — ■ 



534 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

Heroic verse has been always more familiar to me, 
and more easy in point of composition, than prose ; 
my thoughts flow more freely in metre, and I can 
oftentimes fill a page with less labour and less 
time in verse of that description, than it costs 
me to adjust and harmonise a single period in 
prose, to my entire satisfaction. 

" The work I now allude to is my poem of Cal- 
vary, and the gratification, of which I have been 
speaking, mixed, as I trust, with worthier and 
more serious motives, led me to that undertaking. 
It had never been my hard lot to write, as 
many of my superiors have been forced to do, 
task-work for a bookseller, it was therefore my 
custom, as it is with voluptuaries of another 
description, to fly from one pursuit to another for 
the greater zest which change and contrast gave to 
my intellectual pleasures. I had, as yet, done 
nothing in the epic way, except my juvenile 
attempt, of which I have given an extract, and I 
applied myself to the composition of Calvary, with 
uncommon ardour; I began it in the winter, and, 
rising every morning some hours before day-light, 
soon dispatched the whole poem of eight books, at 
the average of full fifty lines in a day, of which I 
kept a regular account, marking each day's work 
upon my manuscript. I mention this because it is 
a fact; but I am not so mistaken as to suppose 
that any author can be entitled to take credit to 
himself for the little care he has bestowed upon his 
compositions. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. . 535 

" It was not till I had taken up Milton's immortal 
poem of Paradise Lost, and read it studiously and 
completely through, that I brought the plan of 
Calvary to a consistency, and resolved to venture 
on the attempt. I saw such aids, in point of cha- 
racter, incident, and diction, such facilities, held 
out by the sacred historians, as encouraged me to 
hope I might aspire to introduce my humble 
Muse upon that hallowed ground without pro- 
faning it. 

" As for the difficulties, which, by the nature of 
his subject Milton had to encounter, I perceived 
them to be such as nothing but the genius of Mil- 
ton could surmount ; that he has failed in some 
instances cannot be denied, but it is matter of 
wonder and admiration, that he has miscarried in 
so few. The noble structure he has contrived to 
raise with the co-operation of two human beings 
only, and those the first created of the human 
race, strikes us with astonishment ; but at the 
same time it forces him upon such frequent 
flights beyond the bounds of nature, and obliges 
him in so great a degree to depend upon the 
agency of supernatural beings, of whose persons 
we have no prototype, and of whose operations, 
offices, and intellectual powers, we are incompe- 
tent to form any adequate conception, that it is 
not to be wondered at, if there are parts and pas- 
sages in that divine poem, that we either pass 
over by choice, or cannot read without regret. 



536 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" Upon a single text in scripture he has described 
■a Battle in Heaven, in most respects tremendously 
sublime, in others painfully reminding us how 
impossible it is for man's limited imagination to 
find weapons for immortal spirits, or conceive an 
army of rebellious angels employing instruments of 
human invention upon the vain impossible idea, 
that their material artillery could shake the imma- 
terial throne of the One Supreme Being, the Al- 
mighty Creator and Disposer of them and the uni- 
verse. Accordingly, when we are presented with 
the description of Christ, the meek Redeemer of 
mankind, going forth in a chariot to the battle, 
brilliant although the picture is, it dazzles, and we 
start from it revolted by the blaze. But when the 
poet, deeming himself competent to find words for 
the Almighty, contrives a conference between the 
First and Second Persons in the Trinity, we are 
compelled to say with Pope — . 

That Gbd the Father turns a school-divine. 

" I must entreat my readers not so to misconceive 
my meaning as to suppose me vain enough to 
think, that by noticing these spots in Milton's 
glorious sun, I am advancing my dim lamp to any 
the most distant competition with it. I have no 
other motive for mentioning them, but to convince 
the patrons of these memoirs, that I did not at- 
tempt the composition of a sacred epic, where he 
must for ever stand so decidedly pre-eminent, till 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5*37 

by comparing the facilities of my subject with the 
amazing difficulties of his, I had found a bow pro- 
portioned to my strength, and (lid not presume to 
bend it till I was certified of its flexibility. 

" It could not possibly be overlooked by me, 
that in taking -the Death of Christ for my subject, 
I had the advantage of dating my poem at a point 
of time, the most awful in the whole history of the 
world, the most pregnant with sublime events, and 
the most fully fraught with grand and interesting 
characters ; that I had those characters, and those 
events, so pointedly delineated and so impressiveLy 
described by the inspired historians, as to leave 
little else for me to do, but to restrain invention, 
and religiously to follow in the path that was 
chalked out to me. Accordingly, I trust there 
will be found very little of the audacity of fancy in 
the composition of Calvary, and few sentiments or 
expressions ascribed to the Saviour, which have 
not the sanction and authority of the sacred records. 
When he descends into Hades, I have endeavoured 
to avail myself of what has been revealed to us for 
those conjectural descriptions, and I hope I have 
not far outstepped discretion, or heedlessly in- 
dulged a wild imagination ; for though I venture- 
upon untouched ground, presuming to unfold a 
scene, which mystery has involved in darkness, 
yet I have the visions of the Saint at Fatmos to 
hold up a light to me, and assist me in my efforts 
to pervade futurity. 



3S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" My first publication of Calvary, in quarto, 
had so languid a sale, that it left me with the in- 
convenient loss of at least one hundred pounds, 
and the discouraging conviction, that the public 
did not concern itself about the poem, or the 
poem maker. I felt at the same time a proud indig- 
nant consciousness, that it claimed a better treat- 
ment: and whilst I called to mind the true and 
brotherly devotion I had ever borne to the fame of 
my contemporaries, I was stung by their neglect ; 
and having laid my poem on the Death of my Re- 
4eemer at the feet of my Sovereign, which, for 
aught that ever reached my knowledge, he might 
or might not have received by the hand of his li- 
brarian, I had nothing to console me but the re- 
flection, that there would, perhaps, be a tribu- 
nal that would deal out justice to me, when I 
could not be a gainer by it, and speak favourably 
of my performance, when I could not hear their 
praises/' 

The conclusion of this extract shows what was 
Cumberland's secret opinion of his poem ; and he 
probably thought (at least Dr. Drake would have 
whispered it to him,) that, like the Paradise Lost, 
it was destined to languish for awhile in obscurity, 
only to burst forth, afterwards, with greater lustre, 
and to acquire a more splendid destiny. 

When Burke published his pamphlet on the 
French revolution, Cumberland was one among 
the many who considered it with admiration. He 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 539 

was not content with silently approving, however ; 
he wrote a letter to Burke, communicating his high 
sense of its merit, to which an answer was politely 
returned. In this answer Burke expresses his sa- 
tisfaction at being applauded by a man so distin- 
guished in literature as Cumberland, and " in so 
great a variety of its branches/' 

To this last expression Cumberland afterwards 
alludes with a just consciousness of its truth, and 
proceeds to exemplify it, dwelling with a pleasing 
remembrance on that division of his labours which 
he had appropriated to the services of religion. — 
He mentions the composition of as many sermons 
as would make a large volume, some of which have 
been delivered from the pulpit. He rendered also 
fifty of the psalms of David into English metre; 
and he wrote a religious and argumentative Tract, 
which I have already alluded to, entitled, " A few 
plain Reasons why we should believe in Christ, 
and adhere to his Religion ; addressed to the Pa- 
trons and Professors of the New Philosophy." 

There is in this pamphlet much solidity of argu- 
ment, and a becoming warmth of persuasion. — 
Novelty, either in the opinions expressed, or in 
the mode of enforcing or illustrating them, could 
hardly be hoped ; and the good to be expected 
was that which might result from concentrating 
the popular opinions on the subjects discussed,'and 
urging them upon the attention by a forcible bre- 
vity of application. This object Cumberland seems 



340 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

very steadily to have kept in view ; but I could 
wish that the introductory paragraphs had been 
written with less levity. In a serious, argumenta- 
tive address, which professes to defend the great 
cause of Christianity, and to convert infidelity by 
the weight and importance of its reasonings, it is 
unbefitting the subject to indulge in a playful irony 
of language, which may amuse men indeed, but 
will never convince them. The Tract commences 
with this sort of buffoonery : 



THE NEW PHILOSOPHY ! 

" Though I doubt not but your illuminated un- 
derstandings are stored with many exquisitely in- 
genious reasons, why this our country should no 
longer retain the character of a christian country, 
yet I hope you will in candour be pleased to let a 
plain man offer you a few plain reasons why he 
conceives it should. Old fashioned folks have 
thought that men are not found to be worse sub- 
jects to their king, worse friends to their country, 
or worse members of society, for having some sense 
of religion ; and the same old fashioned folks have 
habituated themselves to believe, that, anfongst 
all the religions in the world, a better could not 
be taken up than that which we already possess/' 

This is bad enough ; but the following is worse, 
because it is intended for argument, while it is, in 
fact, nothing but banter and burlesque : 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. .541 

*f I declare to you, gentlemen, without going 
out of my way to compliment you, I consider your 
word to be altogether as good as you r oath, for 
your honour is at least as good as your religion ; 
and, as human judges and juries are all you stand 
in awe of, so long as you can keep out of the ca- 
lendar, you can have nothing to apprehend from 
your consciences, having put those active thief- 
catchers to complete silence, and made their office 
a perfect sinecure. You can have no solicitude 
about your country, your friends, or your poste- 
rity, &c." 

I do not think that the cause of truth was likely 
to be much advanced by such arguments as these. 

With the exception of these passages, however, 
the address is written with great propriety, and 
with a due sense of its importance. The conclud- 
ing paragraphs I will extract, for they have much 
energy, and have perhaps the most eloquence of 
any thing Cumberland ever wrote. 

" Being now near the end of my days, I implore 
God to endow my beloved countrymen with a right 
understanding of his mercy; and I conjure them, 
as they value their happiness, their dignity, their 
freedom, their comforts in this life, and their hopes 
of eternal blessedness in the life to come, to beware 
of those ensnaring principles which the enemies of 
their peace are assiduously employed to propagate. 
Stand for your God, my friends, and he will stand 
for you ; put faith into your souls to protect your 



5^% LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

altars, and God will put courage into your hearts 
to defend your coasts. Be steady to your faith, be 
true to your country, be loyal to your king ; he is 
stedfast in his duty, let us be firm in ours ; he has 
never broke faith with us, we will not break faith 
with him. 

" We will rally round his throne, our laws, our 
liberties, and constitution, if the enemy shall in- 
vade us ; we will rally round our altars, our reli- 
gion, and our God, if they send their incendiaries 
amongst us ; and we will hold in sovereign con- 
tempt those frenchified fops in philosophy, who 
would undermine our principles, and when they 
have degraded our understandings to the despica- 
ble level of their own, would deliver us over to be 
slaves and abjects to the domineering tyranny of a 
republic, who, having washed their hands in the 
blood of their earthly sovereign, have filled up the 
measure of their iniquity by renouncing their God. 
All those wretches, unworthy of the name of Bri- 
tons, who, like footpads in the cloaks of philoso- 
phers, lurk about the outskirts of society, that from 
their hiding holes they may come forth, and give 
the stab to the religion of their rejected Saviour, 
are the sneaking emissaries, the insidious cowardly 
abettors of our inveterate and envious enemy. — 
Again I conjure you ; I implore you to beware of 
them; they will civilly, circuitously, cunningly 
attempt to circumvent you ; they will write no- 
vels, histories, dramas, to corrupt you ; they will 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 543 

dress up vicious characters in the borrowed clothes 
of virtue, paint adultresses in amiable but false 
colours, to engage your pity, and exhibit seduc- 
tion, intemperance, impurity, profaneness, even 
atheism itself, in lights so fallaciously attractive, 
as may surprise your passions, and in the unguarded 
moments of weakness insinuate their own diabolical 
principles into your incautious hearts. Once more 
I beseech you to beware of them, and sum up my 
most earnest wishes for your prosperity in the fol- 
lowing prayer: 

" O God, all gracious and all good, on whose 
protecting providence we rest our hope, now in this 
evil time save us we most humbly beseech thee, 
and amidst the terrors of thy judgments, when tri- 
bulation is come upon the earth, send down thy 
Holy Spirit upon us, that turning from the wick- 
edness of our ways, and seeking Thee, in whom 
alone there is salvation, we may obtain remission 
of our sins, and be received, as hitherto we have 
been, into thy most merciful favour and protec- 
tion. Spare us, O Lord, spare us ; And if it be 
thy will to send upon the earth thy three sore evils, 
the sword, the pestilence, and the famine, pour 
not the full vial of thy wrath upon us ; correct us, 
Lord, but not in thine anger, lest thou bring us to 
nothing. We acknowledge and bewail our offences ; 
we lament the influence of those principles, which, 
setting all authority divine and human at defiance, 
are spreading infidelity over the whole christian 



3|& LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

world ; and with horror we confess, that even in 
this our soil those poisonous seeds have taken root. 
Purify our hearts, O God, we beseech thee ; send 
the health of thy saving grace amongst us, and 
enable us to escape that plague, more terrible than 
all which can afflict the body, that great offence 
which can destroy the soul. Direct the councils, 
O Lord, we pray thee, and prosper the endeavours 
of our gracious Sovereign, and those who are in 
authority under him, for the welfare of these king- 
doms ; and keep alive in the hearts of thy faithful 
people that sense of thy true religion, that zeal for 
thy worship, and respect for the church established, 
as may for ever frustrate the devices, and disap- 
point the malice of all such, who either openly re- 
vile thy name, or secretly conspire to ensnare the 
understandings and pervert the minds of weak and 
unstable men. And, O Lord God omnipotent, in 
whose hands are the issues of war and peace, we 
do not presume to search into thy unfathomable 
councils, nor dare to ask how long thou wilt per- 
mit the impious and ungodly men, who are a sword 
of thine, to triumph and lay waste the nations; 
but fight thou for us, O God, who are armed ia 
thy defence, and duly conscious from whom alone 
cometh all victory, are ever prepared to give, not 
unto ourselves, but unto Thee the glory : Save us, 
therefore, we beseech thee, from the hands of our 
enemies : and whilst we praise and magnify thy 
holy name, for thy past mercies vouchsafed to us, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 545 

withdraw not from us thy help, O God, but send 
us forth with hearts confirmed in thy faith, and 
strengthen us for the battle ; so shall the high 
thoughts of the proud be brought low, and the 
enemy, who now boasteth himself in his strength, 
be taught to confess, that in thy name alone there is 
salvation, and that whoso dwelleth under the de- 
fence of the Most High, shall abide under the sha- 
dow of the Almighty/' 

When Cumberland published this tract, he 
sent a copy of it to the Bishop of London, and to 
the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Bishop of 
London politely acknowledged the present : the 
Archbishop of Canterbury did not. Perhaps his 
Grace looked first at the introductory paragraph, 
was displeased with its flippancy, and read no far- 
ther : the only excuse which can be surmised for 
such an omission of common courtesy. 



2N 



»46 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND 



CHAP. XXV. 

Enumeration of Cumberland* s various plays, pro- 
duced between 1790 and 1808. — Of these only 
three deserve to be remembered, the Jew, the 
Wheel of Fortune, and First Love.— 
Examination of each of these dramas. — Sheva 
not skilfully drawn. — Mrs. Inchbald's saga- 
city.— Penruddock an interesting character. — 
A lesson for married people recommended by Mrs 4 
Inch bald. — Cumberland* s great defect as a 
dramatic writer stated. — The forwardness of his 
females. 

In enumerating the multifarious literary produc- 
tions of Cumberland it will not be necessary dis- 
tinctly to examine each. Many of them have 
quietly passed into oblivion, and it would be fri- 
volous to drag them from their quiet slumbers 
in forgetfulness, to subject them to an ordeal 
which they are not calculated to encounter, and 
from which no benefit could be derived. This is 
particularly true of his numerous dramas, few of 
which now keep possession of the stage, though it 
must be confessed that many which are now laid 
by, might be performed with greater advantage to 
public taste and morals than those can which are 
occasionally brought forward. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 547 

These I have noticed with a degree of minuteness 
in proportion to what I conceived to be their me- 
rits, and according to the degree in which I ima- 
gined them to be illustrative of Cumberland's ta- 
lents. In the great mass of his plays, however, 
written between the years 1790 and 1808, I know 
but three that can deserve examination : the Wheel 
of Fortune, the Jew, and First Love. Of these, 
the first is frequently performed, the second some- 
times, and the last never. 

Before I pass to the consideration of these 
dramas, I will enumerate the names of all that 
he produced between the periods already men- 
tioned. 

At the Haymarket theatre was acted the comic 
opera of Wat Tyler, afterwards altered in conse- 
quence of some objections by the Lord Chamber- 
lain, and produced under the name of the Armourer. 
After this the comedies of the Country Attorney, 
and the Box Lobby Challenge, and the drama of 
Don Pedro. For the Box Lobby Challenge a hu- 
morous epilogue was written by George Colman. 

At Drury-Lane were performed the Jew, the 
Wheel of Fortune, First Love, the Last of the 
Family, the Word for Nature, the Dependant, the 
Eccentric Lover, and the Sailor's Daughter. Also, 
(in 1808) after the publication of his Memoirs, a 
comic opera called the Jew of Mogadore, which 
seemed to be intended as another attempt to 
awaken kindness and good will towards the in- 

2 N 9 



548 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

dividualsof that race. The piece failed, however, 
and deservedly, for it had neither mirth, wit, nor 
humour to recommend it. The songs, indeed, 
were somewhat above the ordinary level of such 
compositions, but the dullness of the whole hurried 
it into oblivion. 

At Covent-Garden were acted, The Days of 
Yore j False Impressions, A Hint to Husbands, and 
Joanna of Montfaucon. This last piece I do not 
find any where mentioned by Cumberland ; pro- 
bably he did not regard it as his own, being only 
adapted by him for the stage from one of Kotze- 
bue's dramas. It was acted in 1800, and was 
published with a prologue and a long preface by 
Cumberland. In the prologue he alludes to the 
difficulty of working upon the ideas of another man 
in the following lines : 

The scenes that soon will open to your view, 
In their first sketch a foreign author drew j 
If merely tracing his inventive thought, 
We set translation's servile task at nought, 
All who can judge our labour must confess, 
Originality had made it less. 

The difficulty, indeed, must have been greatly 
increased to Cumberland, because he was unac- 
quainted with the German language, and had to 
trust therefore to the imperfect conceptions of 
another. It was a task, however, unworthy of his 
talents, and the success of the undertaking was 
equal to its merits. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 549 

The comedy of the Jew was the first new piece 
exhibited on the stage of the late Drury-Lane 
theatre, after it had splendidly risen from that ruin 
to which it has been recently devoted a second 
time, and from which it is now a second time likely 
to emerge. Its chief object is distinctly avowed 
by Cumberland to have been the benevolent one 
of rescuing a persecuted race of beings from that 
hereditary contempt and degradation which had 
for ages belonged to them ; and though I do not 
believe that the notions of my countrymen have 
been much softened by this comedy, or by the 
character of Abraham Abrahams in the Observer ^ 
yet every praise must be conceded to the author's 
intention. He has, at least, made three Jews 
amiable and interesting, which might be deemed 
an extraordinary effort, did we not remember that 
Gay has done as much for a highway-man. 

Sheva, however, does not exclusively obtain our 
regard: he is sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes 
contemptible. When he relieves the distresses of 
others with a noble disdain of publicity, nay, 
with a patient endurance of insults as the conse- 
quence, we admire his virtues; but, in making 
him penurious with all the absurd excesses of a 
miser, he too often excites our laughter without 
improving our good will. He is still exhibited 
with some of the presumed attributes of his race, 
but charity is given to him to counterbalance their 
obloquy. Would not Cumberland have done 



550 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

better, however, as his intention really was to 
exalt that people, had he pourtrayed him such as, 
I believe, he might have found him in society, 
liberal, hospitable, kind, and generous, with no 
other difference in his conduct than what a differ- 
ence of religious faith must produce ? To make 
him a miser was to make him despicable : and to 
make, him a miser only that he might have enough 
to assist others was to make him unnatural. No 
man thinks much of his fellow creatures who has 
learned to forget himself,. and it is in a communion 
of interests, pleasures, and feelings that one part, 
and perhaps the greater part, of virtue's delights 
consists. He who has persuaded himself that he 
may starve his servants and his own body, to hoard 
up money for benevolent uses, will soon discover 
that what he wants himself others may want* and 
he will keep his gold untouched. By such conduct, 
too, he fails in the first duty of every man, that to- 
wards himself and to those under him, and how can 
he suppose it more worthy to befriend the stranger 
or the profligate than these ? 

In making Sheva, therefore, a penurious miser, 
that by such self-denial, he might do more good, 
Cumberland violated nature ; and in endeavouring 
to astonish by a combination of characters hitherto 
known to be immiscible, he weakened the effect 
of that union, (the jew and the philanthropist) 
which every man must wish to be not only pro- 
bable but common. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 55l 

Mrs Inchbald, in her prefatory strictures upon this 
comedy ;ventures,however,tocommendCumberland 
for having attained a double purpose in Sheva, that 
of exhibiting a virtuous Jew and a virtuous miser. 
A virtuous Jew he has certainly displayed : but a 
virtuous miser is what no man can display. I 
wish Mrs. Inchbald had duly weighed the import 
of this word before she used it. A miser cannot 
be virtuous : if he be virtuous he is not a miser. 
A miser is a wretch whose whole soul is centered 
in the accumulation of wealth, and who would 
sooner yield the blood from his veins than the gold 
from his coffers. He has but one idea, one wish, 
one enjoyment, and that is to hoard : to give is 
beyond his comprehension. Can such a being be 
virtuous ? No. But if he is virtuous, if he bestows 
as freely as he gathers, if he knows " the luxury 
of doing good," then he cannot be the wretch I 
have described : he cannot be a miser either to 
himself or toothers. Cumberland, however, for- 
getful of this truth, has absurdly endeavoured to 
depict a contradiction, and Mrs. Inchbald, drawing 
her notions from the character instead of from life, 
has applauded it with a contradiction of terms no 
less absurd. 

Her praise of avarice and her condemnation of 
poverty in poets, as the result of their own ex- 
travagance, may be passed over without any reply : 
but the following positions are new in the phi- 
losophy of man, and deserve to be transcribed, 



559 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" Indiscriminate profusion has been the dra- 
matic hero's virtue in every comedy till Cumber- 
land shewed to the long blinded world, that — the 
less a man gives to himself, the more, it is probable, 
he bestows upon his neighbour. This conclusion is 
deriyed from the certainty that — the less a man loves 
himself, the more he is affectionate to others." 

The beautiful novelty as well as obscurity of 
these sentiments, leaves me no hope that I can de- 
monstrate to the reader their peculiar acuteness : 
and I shall dismiss them therefore with simply 
observing, that all social love springs from self- 
love, and that when a man has lost all self-regard, 
all self-reverence, he will soon degenerate into 
misanthropy. It is only while we believe that 
mankind can be useful or pleasing to ourselves that 
we are disposed, as by a mutual obligation, to be 
useful or pleasing to them : but, if we cease to 
care for ourselves, our dependence upon others is 
diminished in proportion, and finding that we can 
do without their aid, we feel no disposition to 
awaken or uphold their benevolence towards us by 
bestowing our aid upon them. 

The other characters of this corned}' seem to 
have been drawn merely as subsidiary to that of 
Sheva. They serve to fill up the scenes and to 
carry on the action ; but they leave no trace upon 
the mind. Jubal is sometimes humorous, indeed, 
but it is the humour of farce rather than of comedv. 
The plot is pleasing, and though not intricate, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 553 

sufficiently perplexed to keep the attention awake. 

The Wheel of Fortune was the next drama that 
Cumberland produced, and its present popularity 
is the best proof of its excellence. There can be 
no doubt, indeed, that Mr. Kemble's performance 
of Penruddock has contributed largely to this 
popularity, and Cumberland justly observes, that 
" when so much belongs to the actor, the author 
must be careful how he arrogates too much to him- 
self:" but still great merit must be allowed 
to the writer. 

It has been very commonly believed that Cum- 
berland derived the general outline of his plot 
from Kotzeb ue's Misanthropy and Repentance^ a 
manuscript translation of which was lying in the 
manager's hands at the time when the Wheel of 
Fortune was produced. The striking similarity 
between the chief incidents of the two plays, jus- 
tified, indeed, this suspicion, and the author of the 
translation from Kotzebue openly accused Cum- 
berland of having unfairly pirated from his work. 
This charge Cumberland as openly denied, and 
professed, I believe, that he took the hint of his 
own play from a review of the German one which 
he accidentally saw. 

Whether, however, he invented or whether he 
borrowed the plot, it is sufficiently certain that it 
is one of peculiar interest, and one which no re- 
petition of performance can hardly rob of its power 
to please. The chief character, (Penruddock) is 



0»54 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

dmwn with some master-stroks of art. That no- 
bleness of nature which misfortune might obscure 
but could not subdue, and that sensibility of heart 
which defied the power of time to eradicate its 
sorrows, are two features in the composition of 
this part which Cumberland has pourtrayed with 
happy skill. Nor ought less praise to be bestowed 
upon him for the judgment and intimate knowledge 
of effect which he has displayed in selecting the 
most interesting situations for the operation of 
these tw r o feelings, without which their exist- 
ence would have impressed the mind but faintly. 
I do not know, indeed, any scene of any modern 
drama, which is conducted with more dexterity 
than the interview between Penruddock and young 
Woodville^ when the former details to the son all 
the baseness of his father. It is wrought up with 
consummate skill. 

The misanthropy of Penruddock consists rather 
in his feelings, than in his practice, towards man- 
kind. He shuns his fellow-creatures, but he does 
not hate them. He seeks solitude as the balm of 
a wounded heart, not as the retirement of a sple- 
netic one. He hides his sorrows from those whom 
he does not think can participate them, but to the 
sorrows of others he is not insensible. A mo- 
mentary gleam of anticipated revenge draws him 
from his seclusion, but the native benevolence and 
kindness of his heart soon subdue all the rough 
asperities of his disposition, and he who came forth 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND, 556 

into society only to punish and destroy, remains 
to do good and to enjoy the satisfaction of it. Such 
is the character of Penruddock, and it must be 
confessed that it required no ordinary powers to 
discriminate its qualities as Cumberland has done; 
for this praise is his alone, Kotzebue's recluse 
being wholly distinct from Penruddock in its com- 
ponent parts. 

Mrs. Inchbald, whom to praise is more pleasing 
than to censure, has written some very sensible 
observations upon this drama, and paid a due 
tribute to the excellence of the actor whose per- 
formance of Penruddock I have already mentioned. 
" Old men in love/' she truly observes, " have 
caused more laughter and derision on the stage, 
than, perhaps, any other common occurrence which 
the dramatist has copied. Here, astonishing re- 
verse ! love, in the decline of life, constitutes a 
character deeply pathetic/' 

All the interest of the play is concentered in this 
character, and Cumberland seems to have been so 
well aware of it, that the other personages of the 
drama are permitted to appear and disappear with- 
out much concern either in the spectator or reader. 
Some attempt to relieve this uniform mediocrity 
has been made, indeed, in the characters of Go- 
vernor Tempest and Sir David Daw ; but though 
they amuse on the stage they lose all power of 
doing it in the closet. Penruddock is the fixed 
star of this comedy, and the rest of the characters 



556 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

are only satellites that move round him with di- 
minished splendor. They are all drawn, indeed, 
with chastity of colouring, but they want boldness 
of expression and design to give them permanent 
effect. 

The language, throughout, is elegant, and in 
Penruddock sometimes elevated ; but the senti- 
ments which he is made to utter are not always 
without inflation and obscurity. The following 
reply to Weazle, who reminds him that money can 
purchase female attractions, has always appeared 
to me ineffably absurd : 

" I keep a woman," says he : " she visits me 
every day, makes my bed, sweeps my house, cooks 
my dinner, and is seventy years of age, — yet I 
resist her." 

It is remarkable that Cumberland did not enter- 
tain the same notion of the merit of this drama as 
the public. To a gentleman who seized an op- 
portunity of thanking him for the delight he had 
experienced in reading it, he replied, with some 
chagrin, " Sir, that is not the best thing I ever 



wrote." 



Such was his opinion ; yet, if I were called upon 
to pronounce which of his dramas I considered as 
the best, upon a general estimation of general ex- 
cellence, I think I should not hesitate to say the 
Wheel of Fortune, There are, in other of his plays, 
particular scenes, perhaps, equal to any that may 
be found in this ; but none of his dramas maintain 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 557 

such a commanding interest in the mind during 
the whole progress off the action, nor is there, in 
any of them, any character so felicitously supported 
throughout as Penruddock. 

The comedy of First Love is greatly inferior 
either to the Jew or the Wheel of Fortune. The 
plot is confused rather than artfully intricate: 
though it is sometimes interesting. The dialogue 
is dull ; it has neither wit, nor any quick recipro- 
cation of lively sentiments. The situations are 
seldom comic ; it approaches decidedly to senti- 
mental comedy in all the worst features of that 
species of composition, and which, if it were 
not redeemed by better instances, I should be 
tempted to condemn with as much severity as 
Voltaire. " Je souscris entierement," says he, 
in a letter to the dramatist, Sumorokof, " a tout 
ce que vous dites de Moliere et de la comedie lar- 
moyante, qui, a la honte de la nation, a succede au 
seul vrai genre comique porte a perfection par 
T inimitable Moliere.' ■ 

Of the characters of this play Sabina's is the 
most interesting, and Billy Bustle's the most con- 
temptible. David Mowbray is well supported in 
some parts. The broken and disfigured language 
of Sabina is badly constructed. It is not the im- 
perfect diction of a foreigner, labouring to express 
herself in a strange tongue, but the blundering 
efforts of one who seems to know no language. 

The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Wrangle are 



JOS LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

absurdly imagined and absurdly supported. They 
quarrel without motive, and are kind again without 
reconciliation. Marriage is embayed with multi- 
tudinous evils, but I do not think that it contains 
such frivolous rancour as this. Domestic wrang- 
lings are common enough in those whom necessity 
compels to live together, but whom nature has 
disjoined in every quality of mind and body : yet, 
there is commonly a cause for bickering, and they 
do not contend as he-cats do only because they 
happen to meet. 

I am sorry that Mrs. Inchbald, whose general 
observations on this play I willingly approve, 
should have singled out these very characters as 
the only objects of her applause. 

" Some excellent instruction to the married," 
says she, " will be found in the connubial conduct 
of Mr. and Mrs. Wrangle, particularly at the con- 
clusion of the fourth act." 

Unfortunate in her praise of the conjugal in- 
structions, she is more than unfortunate in the 
example which she has cited. If there be a scene 
in the whole compass of the English drama, dis- 
tinguished for its unnatural absurdity, it is this 
one, where the contentious couple are suddenly 
converted, at the writer's will, into a loving and 
affectionate pair, by the operation of the following 
dialogue, which I am tempted to copy, only as an 
irresistible proof of my assertions: — - 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 559 

Mr. TV. (after a pause,) Mrs, Wrangle — Love! 
Mrs. TV. Mr. Wrangle — My dear 1 

Mr. TF. I begin to think 

Mrs. TV. What do you begin to think ? 
Mr. TV. That we have exposed ourselves very sufficiently. 
Mrs. W. Quite enough in all conscience. — Why would you complain 
to my father ? 

Mr. TV. Why would you complain to your brother ? 
Mrs. TV. We were both to blame : complaints are very foolish. 
Mr. TV. Then away with them at once, say J. 

Mrs. W. For ever ! Let us forbear to gratify our friends by never 
publishing our disagreements. 

Mr. TV. And cure the world of its contempt, by never calling upon 
it for its pity. 

Mrs. TV. Agreed ! here's my hand upon it. 

Mr. TV. And here's my heart, to which I press you with the warm 
affection of a husband that will never cool. 

Mrs. TV. And I return it with the love and duty of a wife, who will 
never create a murmur nor utter one again. 

Mr. TV. Why this is happiness without hypocrisy. 
Mrs. TV. Perfect felicity unfeigned. , 

Mr. TV. Oh ! joyous husband ! 
Mrs. TV. Oh ! transported wife ! (Exeunt) . 

And, let me exclaim, Oh ! ineffable nonsense ! 
Yet I would praise it more than Mrs. Inchbald 
has even done, and I am sure as sincerely, if I 
could believe that matrimonial quarrels ever ter- 
minated with such a cordial resolution in the 
parties never to renew them. Alas ! if conjugal 
felicity could be purchased by a few exclamatory 
sentences, and a shake of the hand, who would be 
unhappy ? And we are to suppose, from Mrs. 
Inchbald's observations, that they may be so pur- 
chased, or how could we find that " particularly 
excellent instruction to the married," which she 
ascribes to this very scene? Had Cumberland 



660 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

wished to make the reformation of Mr. and Mrs. 
Wrangle morally beneficial, he should have made 
it gradual and probable, so that the spectator 
might acknowledge its verisimilitude and be 
tempted to hope a similar result from the employ- 
ment of similar means. This is the only way in 
which fiction can ever promote the welfare of man- 
kind: for when we see events produced by no 
apparent influence of causes, but by the magic 
decree of the author's will, we feel too intensely 
that they are imaginary, and neither hope to 
produce them in ourselves nor expect to find 
them in others. 

This, however, is the great defect of Cumber- 
land as a dramatic writer: he hastens what he 
wishes to produce with too much rapidity. He 
does not leave it possible for the spectator to sup- 
ply what is wanting, because he has no art in 
making the deficiency appear just what must be 
omitted in the brief scenes of a drama. He seems 
to have regarded himself as a first cause to whom 
all things were possible, without remembering that 
his appeal was to be to finite beings who can admit 
as true only what they can comprehend as such. 

In no comedy of Cumberland's is this defect 
more unpleasantly obvious, perhaps, than in his 
Hint to Husbands, which was acted at Covent- 
Garden in 1806. Here the scenes are hurried on 
with a degree of despatch and a disregard of the 
spectator's right to understand what he is to 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 56\ 

believe, which may be very commodious for the 
indolence of a dramatic writer, but which will be 
surely injurious to his fame. No time is allowed 
for the developement of the passions, but every 
thing happens just as the author requires. The 
play indeed was deservedly unsuccessful, for be- 
sides this prominent deficiency, it wanted every 
requisite of a good comedy. The character of 
Lady Transit is pleasing : but nothing can be more 
frivolously inefficient than the attempts at humour 
in Dogherty. This was his last effort to delineate 
the Irish character, and I think it the last, in 
merit, that has yet been made by any. 

In an address to the Reader^ which is prefixed 
to this play, Cumberland reiterates his boast of 
having " written more for the stage than any one 
of his nation ever did." Of this numeral renown 
he seems to have been proud, for he frequently 
alludes to it : but had his hopes been raised to the 
acquisition of posthumous fame, I think he would 
have wished he had written less. Most of his 
plays exhibit evident marks of rapidity in com- 
position : they want that skilful distribution of the 
incidents, and that nice observance of probability 
in their production, which he had ability enough 
to devise, but had not leisure enough to practise. 

Before I dismiss, from my consideration, the 
dramas of Cumberland, I wish to advert to a 
peculiarity which has been much forced upon 
ray attention by a regular perusal of them. His 

2 O 



->62 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

female characters are all drawn with a degree of 
frankness in love-affairs which a fastidious critic 
might pronounce to be wantonness. Nor does 
this peculiarity belong merely to his plays. In 
his novels it equally prevails. The task of making 
love, as it is termed, he generally throws upon the 
lady, by providing bashful and timid suitors who 
require encouragement to declare their passion. 
It must be allowed that this is unseemly, though 
Cumberland probably thought it natural. If the 
reader require to be convinced of this predilec- 
tion in him for candour and simplicity in females, 
let him examine many of the interviews between 
Arundel and Lady Louisa G. ; between Mortlake 
and Lady Jane; between Henry and Isabella; 
between Charlotte Eusport, in the West Indian, 
and Belcour ; between Sophia, in the Brothers, and 
Belfield, and between Emily in the Wheel of For- 
tune, and Captain Woodville. A very cursory in- 
spection of these scenes will shew him that little 
is left to the lover but silent acquiescence : and 
if he extend his view through all the plays of 
Cumberland he will, perhaps, think with me, that 
what he so uniformly exhibited he practically ap- 
proved of. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 563 



CHAP. XXVI. 

Examination of Cumberland's remaining produc- 
tions. — His Memoirs. — Writes the Exodiad 
in conjunction with Sir J. B. Burges. — Its me- 
diocrity. — Quotation from Moliere applicable 
to Cumberland. — Becomes the editor of the 
Select British Drama. — Engaged in a news- 
paper which fails. — Establishes the London 
Review. — The absurdity of its principle de- 
monstrated. — Its particular defects. — Cumber- 
land's ridiculous praise of Mr. Townsend's 
Armageddon. — Patronises Mr. Stothard's 
painting of Chaucer's Pilgrims. — Publishes 
his poem of Retrospection a few days before 
his death. — Examination of it. 

As I have thus anticipated the literary progress of 
Cumberland, I shall devote this chapter to an exa- 
mination of his remaining productions, and then 
conclude the volume with such a detail of his per- 
sonal history, during the period in which he wrote 
them, as I can procure. 

Of his Memoirs which hold a distinguished 
place among his writings, I can have nothing to 
say here, having had so many occasions of express- 
ing, incidentally, my opinion of them. They will 
always be regarded as an authentic history of his 
private and public life, as far as he has thought it 
9 O 2 



364 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

proper to disclose the particulars of either ; and 
they will always be esteemed for that fund of 
literary anecdote which they contain, and in the 
detail of which Cumberland peculiarly excels. A 
great chasm, however, they must leave in every 
thing relating to his writings, except the simple 
statement of their production, or of the events 
connected with their success or failure : and this 
chasm it has been my object to fill up in the pre- 
sent work. With what success I have done it, 
must be decided by others. 

In 1S07 Cumberland associated himself with Sir 
James Bland Burges, in the task of composing the 
Exodiad) another sacred epic, founded upon that 
portion of scriptural history which comprises the 
history of Moses from the time of his leading the 
Israelites out of Egypt, to his death upon Mount 
Horeb. This poem is divided into two parts, and 
subdivided into eight books. No means are af- 
forded by which to discriminate the respective 
efforts of the respective writers, and praise or 
blame, therefore, cannot be distinctly appropriated. 
This partnership in applause and censure, seems 
to have been studiously sought by the authors, for 
they acknowledge, that though they may fail " to 
leave a monument of their fame, they have suc- 
ceeded in bequeathing a memorial of their friend- 
ship." 

Whoever considers the nature of intellectual 
labour, will be immediately sensible that it is im- 
possible for two men so to exercise their fancy and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 565 

judgment, in conjunction, upon any single topic, 
as to produce a regular and harmonious whole. 
There will necessarily be a diversity of style, of 
sentiments, and of language ; and if, in any part, 
they endeavour to incorporate their distinct pro- 
ductions by a thorough intermixture of sentences, 
the most discordant effect must be produced. Al! 
that can be done by such joint manufacturers is, for 
each to take his single book or division, and when 
the whole is written, to unite them with as much 
dexterity as they can. This was the plan com- 
monly pursued by Beaumont and Fletcher, by 
Massinger and Decker, and by Dryden and Lee ; 
and it is the only one by which any probability of 
success can be entertained. But even then, a 
general discrepancy will be sufficiently obvious, 
for, in any extensive work embracing many cir- 
cumstances and descriptions, and much diversity 
of incident, it requires all the vigilance of a single 
author to avoid inconsistencies and contradiction, 
and how difficult, therefore, if not impossible, 
it must be for two men to commingle their ideas 
without confusion or perplexity. 

If I would deliver an opinion upon this work, 
which I might afterwards support by evidence, if 
required, I should say, that it is inferior, in many 
parts, to Calvary, while, perhaps, it equals that 
poem in others. The versification is fluent, but 
seldom vigorous or animated. The observance of 
scriptural facts is carefully maintained, but they 



566 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

are too little diversified by poetical imagery. The 
general character of the work is, I am afraid, 
languid mediocrity when tried by the test of an 
epic poem, which, to be any thing, must be great. 

Mediocribus esse poetis, 
Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnae. 

It is with regret that I deliver this opinion upon 
the production of a gentleman (Sir James Bland 
Burges), from whom I once expected some assist- 
ance in the present volume, in consequence of a 
voluntary and polite offer on his part, to which 
I shall probably have occasion to advert yet more 
minutely. My undertaking, however, imposed 
upon me the necessity of telling what I thought, 
and the reader who has perused these pages will 
willingly acknowledge, I believe, that I have done 
so hitherto with fearless sincerity and candour. I 
must confess, indeed, I have yet to learn that art 
which Cumberland eminently possessed, of finding 
prodigies where other men would have found no- 
thing. Yet, far be it from me to accuse him of 
hypocrisy. I have already said, that I believe it 
sprung from a warm benevolence of character, an 
eager desire to think mankind as amiable as he 
wished them, and their achievements as splendid 
as he thought them. It was an error, however, 
and a sickening one, when practised to excess, as 
Cumberland too commonly did. For myself, I 
would say with Moliere's Misanthrope : 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 56? 

Non, je ne puis souffrir cette laehe metbode, 

Qu' afFectent la plupart de vos gens a la mode : 

Et je ne hais rien tant que les contorsions 

De tous ces grands faiseurs de protestations, 

Ces affables donneurs d'embrassades frivoles, 

Ces obligeans diseurs d'inutiles paroles, 

Qui de civilites avec tous font combat, 

Et traitent du raeme air l'honnete homme et le fat, 

Quel avantage a-t-on qu'un bomme vous caresse, 

Vous jure amitie, foi, zele, estime, tendresse, 

Et vous fasse de vous un eloge eclatant, 

Lorsqu'au premier faquin il court en faire autant ? 

Non, non ; il n'est point d'ame un pen bien situee, 

Qui veuille d'une estime ainsi prostituee ; 

Et la plus glorieuse a des regals peu cbers, 

Des qu'on voit qu'on nous mele avec tout l'univers: 

Sur quelque preference une estime sefonde, 

Et c'est rCestimer rien qu'estimer tout le monde. 

It appears to me that the last couplet of this 
extract applies with singular propriety to that pli- 
ancy of commendation by which Cumberland was 
distinguished, and which he bestowed upon all 
who applied for it in the right way. The praise 
he gave, however, he was equally willing to re- 
ceive ; and I have been told, by one who knew 
him intimately, that no adulation could be too 
exuberant for his acceptance. 

Dr. Drake, perhaps, in some future edition of 
his Literary Hours, may discover that the Exodiad, 
as well as Calvary, is embued with the genuine 
spirit of Milton, and his eulogy would easily out- 
weigh my censure. In me it may be defect of 
taste or judgment, that I do not estimate this 
poem more highly: and from a presumption so 



«56S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

extremely probable, I can conceive that every con- 
solation maybe derived. 

Cumberland, in the latter years of his life, la- 
boured for the booksellers, sometimes anony- 
mously, and sometimes not. Among many 
schemes to which this sort of employment gave 
rise, may be reckoned his edition of the Select 
British Drama, in which he undertook to publish 
a series of those plays, which still take their turn 
upon the stage, and to preface them with lives of 
the authors, and a critical examination of each 
drama. To this task he was perfectly competent; 
but I have never heard what success attended the 
plan. In the first number, which contained Evert/ 
Man in his Humour, he has given a succinct his- 
tory of the rise and progress of the stage; and in his 
strictures upon Congreve's Love for Love, he is 
justly indignant at his grossness and obscenity. 

I should have mentioned that he was associated, 
in 1803, with Mr. Peltier, Sir James Bland Burges, 
and some other gentlemen, in projecting and esta- 
blishing a weekly newspaper, Nvhich was intended 
to maintain a higher literary character than com- 
monly belongs to our daily journals. But it main- 
tained no character at all, and soon fell. Its name 
I have forgotten. 

In 1809 he published the first number of the 
London Review, with the chimerical idea that 
contemporary criticism could derive advantage 
from robbing it of its anonymous importance. 
When the proposals for this work were first issued, 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 569 

I was forcibly struck with the absurdity of its prin- 
ciple, and communicated my opinions to the pub- 
lic through the medium of a respectable periodical 
publication. These opinions were confirmed by 
the destiny of the London Review, and the result 
which I presumed to augur speedily ensued. 

The abuses of anonymous criticism have, indeed, 
been long and loudly complained of, nor is it likely 
that any remonstrances will diminish the evil. As 
long as men can attack, secure from retalia- 
tion, they will do it; for the leaven of malignity 
and envy is too intimately incorporated with our 
nature, not to ferment into action when it may be 
done with impunity. 

It has been thought, however, that an effectual 
remedy for this evil, would be the certain know- 
ledge of those who propagate it ; and that if every 
man who condemned another were known as the 
condemned he would feel the influence of certain 
moral considerations which now operate but laxly 
while his deeds are deeds of darkness. That this 
reasoning is right, as far as the abuse of criticism 
is considered, must be confessed. There can be 
no doubt, that he who affixes his name to what he 
writes, will write more circumspectly than he who 
does not; but, when it is recollected that the 
misuse of the critical function is not so flagrant as 
is commonly believed, it will hardly be thought 
that every thing would be gained if that misuse 
were diminished. 



^70 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

In reading an anonymous criticism we read it 
without any undue bias or partiality ; if it have 
merit, that merit is allowed to have its fair influ- 
ence upon our minds. We judge of it by itself 
without any reference to the presumed qualifica- 
tions of the author ; we are not subdued by the 
authority of a name. 

If we could suppose that the most eminent 
names in modern* literature would be found in the 
pages of a review, established upon a principle si- 
milar to Cumberland's, I do not think that any 
advantage would be gained beyond the abolition of 
some practices in anonymous criticism, which are 
disgraceful to letters. The rigid integrity of a 
Brutus or a Cato must not be expected. Lite- 
rary men constitute a sort of fraternity : they are 
usually acquainted with each other, or likely to be 
so ; and the feelings of friendship and esteem 
would be perpetually clashing with the duties of 
the critic. Will the man, who has dined at my 
table to day, and partaken of my hospitality and 
kindness, sit down to-morrow and avowedly endea- 
vour to sink my character in the public estimation? 
No : unless he would be hunted from society he 
cannot do this ; if he would be received as a 
member of it, he must conform to its duties ; and 
though the book I have published may be bad, or 
vicious, or erroneous, yet, the condemnation of it 
.must not come publicly from the hand of my friend. 
The cause of sound literature would, therefore, be 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 57 1 

injured by such a scheme, and criticism would 
sink into a mere interchange of civilities and 
courtesies. 

Let it be imagined that such a plan had been 
projected fifty years ago, and that Johnson, Gold- 
smith, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and other emi- 
nent men, had consented to lend it the authority 
of their names, would it have been possible for 
them to exercise their judgments with real im- 
partiality ? I can conceive that they might, 
perhaps, have imitated other critical professors in 
merciless severity towards the humble, the obscure, 
and the unassuming delinquent, but we should 
surely have found them sufficiently polite, cere- 
monious, and affable towards each other. 

Nor could it be otherwise, living, as they did, in 
splendid intimacy together ; and the influence of 
this feeling would have extended beyond them- 
selves and their respective productions. It would 
have taken in the circle of each man's acquaint- 
ance, and embraced, consequently, in its wide 
circumference, every writer who had risen only 
to such comparative distinction as might entitle 
him to their friendship and notice. What then 
would have been their situation ? Between Scylla 
and Charybdis. If they praised, the world would 
have accused them of adulation ; if they censured, 
an outcry would have been raised against them for 
envy and malignity. They could not have avoided 
self-condemnation on the one hand, or the world's 



5?2 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

condemnation on the other. And would they 
have found an adequate reward for such persecu- 
tion and trial, in the pecuniary remunerations of a 
bookseller ? The answer is obvious. They would 
have spurned at the illusion which would mislead 
them under the guise of candour and honesty, and 
they would have left to venal and obdurate minds 
what only venal and obdurate minds could per- 
form. 

To such objections the scheme of Cumberland's 
Review was abstractedly liable : but it exhibited 
some particular deficiences, when it made its ap- 
pearance. Of the names that appeared, and whose 
authority was to overwhelm, as with a torrent, the 
feeble defences of anonymous criticism, there were 
not more than two or three that had yet been heard 
of, and not even the illusion^ therefore, of signa- 
tures respectable in literature was^preserved. What 
then was gained by this nominal review ? A disclo- 
sure which rather weakened than enforced authority: 
a declaration which destroyed the effect it was in- 
tended to produce. Could it, indeed-, be imagined 
that the mere knowledge of the critic was to operate 
as a charm, and that in consideration of know- 
ing who he was, the public would be indifferent 
about what he was ? Was it to be supposed that 
they would prefer acknowledged dullness, insipidity, 
or adulation, to unacknowledged wit, learning, and 
genius ? Omne igno turn pro magniftco. The very 
obscurity which belongs to anonymous criticism 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5J3 

increases its power, because, without knowing 
specifically who writes a particular article, we know, 
generally, that many of the first literary characters 
lend their pens to this office, and in the ambiguity 
which envelopes the question there is room enough 
for the imagination to act upon a rational basis of 
credibility. 

The fate of the London Review will deter all 
future projectors from any similar undertaking, to 
which a moral impossibility of success seems to be 
inevitably attached. Some of Cumberland's co- 
adjutors proved themselves men of talents ; and 
many of the articles were superior to the ordinary 
compositions of periodical critics. Yet it soon 
perished : and though this early fate may be partly 
ascribed, perhaps, to the impression produced by 
some criticisms of extraordinary imbecility, no dis- 
play of excellence could have secured it from 
ultimate failure. 

In Cumberland I have no doubt that the under- 
taking was suggested by a sincere wish to see 
criticism stripped of that insidious covering beneath 
which she now aims her assassin blows unseen 
and unknown. Such was his wish, and it is one 
in which every man must concur, though every 
man will feel, perhaps, that the only remedy is one 
which would entail greater evils than those it 
amended. Cumberland's opinion with regard to 
anonymous censure was not hastily adopted. In 
the twenty-second number of the Observer he says, 



57-h LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" I cannot state a case in which a man can be 
justified in treating another's name with freedom, 
and concealing his own/' Some part of his zeal 
may perhaps be attributed to the recollection of 
his own sufferings : and if he believed that every 
other author partook of his sensibility, it was only 
a common act of benevolence to endeavour at the 
extinction of a power beneath which so many 
writhed. 

Of the articles which Cumberland himself wrote 
for his Review, only one deserves to be remem- 
bered, and that is the first in the third number, 
which contains admirable sketches of those per- 
formers with whose merits he had been familiar in 
his youth. 

He seems to have felt the unenviable situation 
in which an acknowledged critic places himself, 
by selecting, for his own labours, the productions of 
recently deceased writers, whom to blame would 
lead to no future embarrassments. He has de- 
parted from this plan only in two or three instances, 
and one of them provided him with an opportunity 
of renewing his controversy with Mr. Hayley. 

Every one who has inspected the Londan Re- 
view must have turned away displeased from the 
absurd examination of a poem, (Mr. Townsend's 
Armageddon) then only in embrio and not yet in 
existence ; and more than displeasure must have 
been excited by that strain of servile adulation 
and that sort of amorous fondness with which the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5J5 

young man's literary and personal accomplishments 
are celebrated. The motive was not sufficiently 
powerful to justify so irregular a proceeding, and 
I have been told that two of his friends, who fully 
appreciated the folly he was about to commit, 
exhausted, but in vain, all their powers of persua- 
sion to induce him to relinquish the idea. What 
this " super-human" work will be, when it comes 
forth, if it ever does come forth, is yet to be dis- 
covered: but that " fermentation of genius," which 
was so visible in Mr. Townsend's u expressive 
countenance," has produced nothing hitherto 
which candour can commend. It is his misfortune, 
I am afraid, that Cumberland was his patron. His 
work is nobly conceived : I have read the argu- 
ments of each book with delight : and nothing 
diminished the satisfaction which I felt, but the 
mortifying reflection that it is easy to project what 
it is not easy to perform. The deliberative and 
executive powers of man are frequently disjoined 
by an infinite space : the unbodied conceptions of 
the mind often soar beyond our own powers of 
adequate delineation. In this condition I imagine 
Mr. Townsend to be ; and I form the opinion from 
the specimens of his composition produced by 
Cumberland, which do not contain any of that 
power of language, that loftiness of imagery, or that 
metrical skill which must belong to a successful 
candidate for epic fame. I have looked also into 
a volume of poems recently published by Mr. 



576 LIFE OP CUMBERLAND. 

Townsend, and find in them nothing beyond tune- 
ful mediocrity. 

Cumberland's admiration of him, however, I be- 
lieve to have been sincere : and I wish the event may 
prove that it was rational. A natural benevolence 
of character led him to befriend talent wherever he 
found it, and though his zeal to serve sometimes 
degenerated into an erroneous appreciation of its 
object, his heart must be unenviably obdurate 
who does not honour the principle. One of the 
latest efforts which he made to assist the progress 
of genius, was his unsolicited exertion in behalf of 
my friend Mr. Cromek's picture of Chaucer s 
Pilgrims. He was struck with the admirable exe- 
cution of the artist, Mr. Stothard,and prevailed upon 
Mr. Hoppner to give his opinion of its merits in a 
letter to him, the use of which was granted to Mr. 
Cromek, to whom the picture belonged, and who 
had issued proposals for having it engraved by the 
late ingenious Schiavonetti. In all that Cumber- 
land did on this occasion, he acted purely from a 
desire to befriend the progress of the fine arts ; 
and as it was no less unexpected than unasked, 
the grace and value of it were enhanced in pro- 
portion. 

The last work which he produced, and which 
was published only a few days before his death, 
was his poem of Retrospection, which commences 
with apathetic solemnity heightened by the fulfil- 
ment of the prophecy. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 577 

World, I have known thee long, and now the hour 
When I must part from thee is near at hand : 
I bore thee much good will, and many a time 
In thy fair promises repos'd more trust 
Than wiser heads and colder hearts would risque. 

The greater part of this poem is devoted to the 
commemoration of the same persons and events as 
had already been exhibited and discussed in his 
Memoirs \ and as it frequently creeps with all 
the languor of measured prose, the reader some- 
times forgets that he has exchanged one production 
for the other* It is sufficiently querulous, and yet 
it is full of declarations why the writer should be 
contented. Many passages from it I have extracted 
into this volume, where they related to the topics 
I was upon, and from them a very adequate notion 
may be formed of the whole. It is written with 
an easy flow of versification, and contains some 
pleasant talk about past times : but poetry it has 
none. Cumberland, indeed, seems to have justly 
appreciated its character by the motto which he has 
prefixed. 

Neque si quis scihat uti nos 
Sermoni propriora, putes hunc esse poetam.— — Hor. 

The domestic retrospections form, perhaps, the 
most pleasing portions of this work ; for it is in 
them that feeling predominates, and which, by 
awakening the sympathy of the reader, lulls his 
judgment into silent acquiescence. Who, for in- 
stance, reading the following lines, could forget the 

2 P 



57S LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

afflictions of an old man broken down by sorrows 
and infirmities, while he stopped to pick out a 
fault or two ? He that could, may claim praise for 
that which speaks better for his head than his 
heart : — 

Well it beseems that hoary head should bow 
In resignation to th' Almighty will. 
No fear but time will furnish griefs enough : 
We need not fabricate them for ourselves. 
Dwell where we will, earth will not always show 
A smooth and smiling surface to our view : 
Our eyes will still be wand' ring where the turf 
Swells into hillocks to denote the spot 
Where some dead friend has tenanted the soil. 
A few brief flowers may form a summer fence 
Around our habitation, but, without, 
The dreary Golgotha of death will lodge 
The great majority of those we lov'd. 
If still the giver of my life delay 
Th' exterminating stroke, and lengthen out 
The date of my mortality, shall I 
Insult his patience with profane complaint, 
When, homeward as I bend my weary way, 
I meet a widowed daughter pale and wan 
With anxious watchings o'er the nightly couch 
Of her dead husband ? What a monitor 
Art thou, O Death, to me, whom thou hast spar'd 
Longer by half a century of years 
Than that young warrior " fest'ring in his shroud !" 
I take his hand : 'tis clench'd and cold as stone : 
Dark are the eyes and clos'd, which late I saw 
All bright and beaming with heroic fire- 
Such we must be — so shall we all appear. — 

This " widow'd daughter" is still his Marianne, 
whom he seems never weary of celebrating. She 
had been recently married to a German officer of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 579 

the name ofJansen, who accompanied our ill-fated 
expedition to Walcheren, and was one of the many 
that fell victims to the malignant influence of the 
climate. 

I have thus gone through my examination of 
Cumberland's principal works, apportioning my 
remarks to the comparative importance of the 
subjects. He wrote upon whatever suggested 
itself to his mind, and though it may easily be 
conjectured, therefore, that he did not write with 
uniformity of excellence, yet, if a list of his pro- 
ductions were made, it would not only be a long 
one, but an honourable testimony of his talents 
and industry. When, however, Dr. Drake, in 
reference to these numerous labours, asserted that, 
" to no author of the eighteenth century, in polite 
literature, are we under greater obligations," I 
presume he forgot both the numerical and intrinsic 
value of Johnson's writings. 



2 P 9 



530 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

CHAP. XXVII. 

Cumberland loses his wife. — Appointed colonel of a 
volunteer regiment. — His controversy with Mr. 
Hayley. — His meanness of adulation towards 
his friends.- — Exemplified in his praise of Sir 
James Bland Burges, whom he calls a Homer ! 
• — His antipathy to Gray. — Liter es ted himself in 
the success of a third theatre. — His benevolence 
instanced by an amusing anecdote. — His death.— - 
Buried in YYestminster Abbey. — An oration 
pronounced over his grave by the Dean of West- 
minster. — The erroneous praise contained in 
it. — A character of Cumberland* s colloquial abU 
lities. — His posthumous pieces. — His family. — 
His will. — Some observations on Mrs. Jansen's 
proceedings respecting one of its provisions. 

Nothing now remains for me to do but to relate 
the personal occurrences of Cumberland's life 
during the period in which those productions, al- 
ready enumerated, were given to the world. They 
are but few, indeed, and not very interesting ; yet 
they must be told. 

At what time he lost his wife he has not speci- 
fied, but says it was " some time after the death 
of his eldest son, who died in Tobago/' She was 
so lamentably reduced by illness, in her latter days, 
that Cumberland's house was inaccessible even 
to his nearest friends and neighbours : " her nerves 
being utterly destroyed, and even her recollection 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5S\ 

impaired, by the effects of the breaking of a blood 
vessel, which no art could heal, every step that 
approached her, threw her into tremours, and it 
required careful preparation to enable her to sup- 
port an interview with any of her children, who 
came at times to pay their duty to her/' To a 
being thus debilitated by disease, death must have 
been a welcome event ; nor could it be much 
otherwise than welcome to those whose duty it 
was to endure all the peevish and wearisome ca- 
prices of a mind broken down by infirmities. 

During his abode at Tunbridge he was in the 
practice of paying annual visits to a Mrs. Blud- 
worth, of Holt, near Winchester, and while there 
he sometimes amused himself with slight and trivial 
efforts of composition. These he has preserved 
in his Memoirs, but they have little merit. That 
entitled Affectation is the best. 

When the terror of invasion was in its highest 
state of aggrandisement, and the people of England, 
with a promptitude of patriotism which did them 
immortal honour, rallied round their king and con- 
stitution, Cumberland Avas solicited by the inha- 
bitants of Tunbridge to head them as volunteers, 
and to which solicitation he acceded. This situa- 
tion he discharged with such general applause 
that when the volunteer system was discounte- 
nanced, and his corps dismissed, they voted him 
a sword by the hand of their Serjeant Major, u as 
a tribute of their esteem for their beloved com- 
ma nder/" 



6Sf LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

In the supplement to his Memoirs, which he 
published in 1806, to supply that barrenness of 
contemporary history which the tedious details of 
his Spanish mission had occasioned, he remon- 
strates with Mr. Hayley, who, in his life of Cow- 
per, had attacked Cumberland for professing too 
great an admiration of Bentley's character. That 
Cumberland should have contemplated, with some 
enthusiasm, an ancestor so eminently endowed as 
Bentley, may surely be forgiven, for, of all errors, if 
it were one, it was the most venial. Upon this 
ground, therefore, Cumberland might have stood, 
and proudly maintained his right : but, when he 
censured Mr. Hayley for expressing his opinion of 
Bentley's qualities as a scholar and critic, he only 
made himself ridiculous, by shewing that he 
thought every man was to think of his grandfather 
with the same excess of fondness that he did. 

This is as much as need be said of the matter, 
adding only that Cumberland is certainly superior 
to his antagonist in the elegance and mildness of 
his rebuke, and in the suavity of his language. I 
wish, however, that he had not confounded Cowper 
with his biographer, nor strove, while he was com- 
bating the one, to cast a shade of opprobrium 
upon the memory of the other. This was frivolous 
resentment. 

There is, in this supplement to his Memoirs, a 
pleasing accession of anecdote, but it is disfigured, 
like its preceding pages, by a prostitution of praise. 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. oS3 

Cumberland knew not how to employ the language 
of commendation when speaking of his friends : 
every man who wrote a verse was a Milton, and 
every composer of a play was a Shakspeare. The 
lulling strains of his adulation soothe all alike ; and 
to him might have been said what Dr. Johnson once 
replied to a lady who was servilely harrassing him 
with eulogies, " Madam, before you praise me, 
consider what your praise is worth." Manly com- 
mendation, directed to manly attainments, is ho- 
nourable to the giver and the receiver: but the 
friskings of a fawning applauder excite only con- 
tempt when interested, and only pity when the 
result of imbecility. 

It is curious, too, to remark upon what grounds 
Cumberland sometimes builds the foundations of 
his applause. He is absolutely convulsed with 
admiration when he tells that his friend, Sir James 
Bland B urges, wrote his poem of Richard Cceur 
de Lion, with more rapidity than Pope translated 
Homer : but I am afraid they who have formed 
the most accurate opinion of Sir James* genius 
will easily believe that he might have written it 
all in just that time which was requisite to commit 
it to paper. Yet Cumberland tells him that he 
writes like Homer : and then naturally wonders that 
the world has not estimated the merit of his " ex- 
traordinary poem." I have no objection, however, 
that he should be a second Homer, for Dr. Drake 
has told us that Cumberland was a second Milton. 



584 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

To the real merits of Sir James Bland Burges, I 
hope I am as sensible as any man need be : but I 
feel more sorrow than offence when I see a respect- 
able writer in danger of being transformed into a 
literary fop by the malignant influence of unde- 
served praise. Sir James will think he knows the 
origin of this opinion, and may wander into error 
perhaps : if he would know the true one, he may 
wander through his own works. I hope I am 
incapable of visiting the offences of the man upon 
the author, as I know I am incapable of praising 
any man whom I do not think deserving of it : but 
I will own, that tenderness for a friend would teach 
me to suppress the opinion whose disclosure would 
hurt his feelings. Nay, an obligation less solemn 
than friendship, the remembrance of past courtesies, 
would impel me to the same forbearance: and Sir 
James may, therefore, guess why I have now told 
what I think. Had Johnson been my contempo- 
rary, and had he conducted himself towards me 
with an insincerity which a gentleman might blush 
at, I might have accused him of it, but I could not, 
without the charge of impotent malignity, have 
retaliated, by telling him of his imbecility as a 
writer. — I now return to Cumberland. 

It would be tedious to follow him through all 
the discursive pages of his supplement, for who 
wishes to know that Mr. Sharon Turner wrote a 
letter to him full of compliments, and that he is 
consequently " one of the best writers, one of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 585 

the most learned antiquarians, and most enlight- 
ened scholars of his time," that the Earl of Dor- 
chester flattered him with another letter, and that 
Lord Erskine refused to write him any letter? 
These things, and many like them, may surely be 
passed over, without any loss to the reader, or any 
reproach to myself. It may be mentioned, how- 
ever, that for the melo-dramatic piece, which was 
represented at Drury-Lane theatre in commemo- 
ration of the illustrious Nelson's death, he received 
the present of a gold snuff-box ; — and that the Lord 
Chamberlain refused his license to a more matured 
effort for the same purpose, which was to have 
been acted at Co vent-Garden on the evening after 
his public funeral. 

Cumberland seems to have shared, with John- 
son, an antipathy to Gray. He calls him, in the 
first volume of his Memoirs, by no very cleanly 
metaphor, " the most costive of poets/' alluding, 
I suppose, to the paucity of his production ; 
and in his poem of Retrospection, he mentions 
him with a sort of contumelious pertness, where 
he parallels his ode on the death of Walpole's 
cat with the puny effusions of youthful wit- 
lings, whom injudicious admiration would cocker 
into great poets as Cumberland himself would 
some of his friends. This prejudice, however, 
against a man whose writings breathe all the 
genuine inspiration of poetry, is entitled to very 
little respect : for it seems to have been enter- 



5S6 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

tainecl by him without any precise conviction of 
its propriety. 

There is some good dramatic criticism in this 
supplement, and I think the observations of Cum- 
berland, upon the illiberal mode in which theatrical 
managers or their deputies dismiss the manuscripts 
of those who unsuccessfully offer them for accept- 
ance, entitled to very great applause. They are 
evidently the opinions of a man who well knew 
the subject; and the spirit of candour and tender- 
ness which is displayed in them does honour to 
his character. 

Cumberland passed much of his time at Rams- 
gate, where he rented a furnished house, and where 
he wrote the greater part of his Memoirs, literally, 
as he says, c< provided with nothing but the mere 
materials for writing, having left his books and 
papers in their packages at Tunbridge Wells," 
where they remained in 1807? when he added his 
supplement to that work. In occasional visits to 
this place, to Tunbridge, and to London, he passed 
the short period that elapsed between the publica- 
tion of his Memoirs and his death. 

When the project for erecting a third theatre 
was vehemently pursued, Cumberland lent it the 
assistance of his name and talents. Most, if not 
all, of the addresses, statements, and advertise- 
ments, which appeared, were by him. He interested 
himself in the success of the undertaking with 
great ardour ; and w r as frequently heard to say that 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5B 

he only wished to live till its completion, when 
he could resign his last breath without a desire un- 
gratified. 

He had much benevolence of disposition and 
urbanity of temper. I have heard an anecdote of 
him which illustrates both. A bookseller, with 
whom he afterwards had some literary connection, 
found himself in the Tunbridge stage with an old 
gentleman and two ladies. The conversation was 
desultory, and among other topics one of the ladies 
mentioned that she had been, the preceding even- 
ing, to see the comedy of the West Indian, and 
was much delighted with it. " Aye," observed 
the sagacious bibliopolist, " it is a very good co- 
medy to be sure ; a very good one : Mr. Cumber- 
land, the author of it, was once a very great man ; 
a very celebrated man: wrote a great deal, and was 
much thought of; but, poor man, he has quite 
written himself down ; he is out of date now ; he 
is too old to produce any thing worth reading ; I 
am sorry he does not know this, and keep from 
tiring the public with his drivellings: it's a great 
pity." — " Sir," rejoined one of the ladies, inter- 
rupting this critical volubility, " that gentleman 
opposite to you is Mr. Cumberland." — " Ma'am ! 
— Sir! — I beg pardon. — I did not mean to say 
any thing disrespectful. — I did not think I had the 
honour of sitting in the same vehicle with so 
celebrated a man. — I am very sorry. — I merely 
meant " " My dear Sir," said Cumberland 



5S8 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

to the affrighted and confounded bookseller, " no 
apologies ; your opinion is, I dare say, a very 
correct one ; I will not dispute it." This cour- 
tesy only heightened the embarrassment of the 
offender, and he continued in no enviable situation 
till the coach arrived at its destination, when 
Cumberland politely requested his company to a 
dish of coffee, as a final proof that he was un- 
touched by his censures. The bookseller assented, 
and he so soon altered his notions, that he after- 
wards undertook a very expensive work, to be 
produced by the man whom he had so recently 
pronounced to have written himself down. 

Cumberland's death was not preceded by any 
tedious or painful illness. The uniform temper- 
ance of his life was such that he might justly hope 
a calm and gentle dismission to another state ; that 
euthanasia for which Arbuthnot so tenderly sighed, 
for which every man must devoutly wish, and which, 
indeed, as I have heard, was vouchsafed to Cumber- 
land. He was indisposed only a few days previ- 
ously, and quietly resigned his soul to its maker, 
at the house of his friend, Mr. Henry Fry, in Bed- 
ford Place, Russell Square, a gentleman whom he 
mentions with great kindness in his Memoirs. 
This melancholy event took place on the 7th of 
May, 1311. 

When his death was known, it excited a very 
general sensation in the literary world. He had, 
indeed, lived through so long a period, had written 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5$9 

so much, had acquired so general a repu- 
tation as an elegant scholar and author, and had 
been connected so intimately with the most emi- 
nent men of the last half century, that his loss 
seemed to dissever from us the only remaining 
link of that illustrious circle by which the indivi- 
duals who composed it were still held to us. 

He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 
14th of May. His remains were interred in 
Poet's Corner, near the shrine of his friend Gar- 
rick. The funeral was attended by a numerous 
procession, which reached the abbey about one 
o'clock, where they were met by Dr. Vincent, 
Dean of Westminster, the long-remembered friend 
and early school-fellow of Cumberland. His office 
must, therefore, have been an affecting one. When 
the body was placed in the grave, he pronounced 
the following oration : 

" Good People : the person you see now depo- 
sited, is Richard Cumberland, an author of no 
small merit ; his writings were chiefly for the 
stage, but of strict moral tendency ; they were not 
without faults, but they were not gross, abounding 
w T ith oaths and libidinous expressions, as I am 
shocked to observe is the case of many of the pre- 
sent day. He wrote as much as any one ; few 
wrote better ; and his works will be held in the 
highest estimation as long as the English language 
will be understood. He considered the theatre a 
school for moral improvement, and his remains are 



.590 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

truly worthy of mingling with the illustrious dead 
which surround us. Read his prose subjects on 
divinity! there you will find the true christian 
spirit of the man who trusted in our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ : May God forgive him his 
sins, and at the resurrection of the just receive 
him into everlasting glory !" 

To this affectionate testimony, thus solemnly 
delivered, I would not willingly object, for I reve- 
rence the sacredness of friendship, and acknow- 
ledge the influence of tenderness at so pathetic a 
moment. But when the venerable survivor of 
Cumberland pronounced of his writings collectively, 
for so I apprehend the sentence, that they were 
" of strict moral tendency," he surely forgot, or 
he never read, his novels; and when he specifi- 
cally praised his plays, as being free from " oaths," 
I must attribute the assertion to the same cause. 
I will acknowledge, indeed, that Cumberland's 
offences of this nature were much fewer than those 
either of his predecessors, contemporaries, or suc- 
cessors ; but they were too frequent, notwith- 
standing, to justify the unqualified eulogy of Dr. 
Vincent. I am aware that a catalogue, disproving 
this commendation, mav seem irreverent and 
indecorous ; but I am so unwilling to be thought 
an accuser without proof, (a practice too com- 
mon in modern criticism), that I will venture to 
substantiate mine by such evidence as cannot 
be gainsayed. I will select, not all, by many of 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 5§7 

the instances in which Cumberland has employed 
unmeaning and unnecessary oaths : 

" What a damnd queer old figure Frampton 
makes of himself." (Choleric Man, Act I. Sc. I.) 

" Death and the Devil! how shall I break pas- 
ture without his seeing me !" (lb. Act IV. Sell.) 

" A rascally scaramouch winds me, a damned 
blast on his post-horn." — " The cask gave a cursed 
crack/' &c. (Ibid, Act IV. Sc. II.) 

" Death and the Devil! a chambermaid f" (lb. 
Act V. Sc. II.) 

" Hoot ! fellows, haud your bonds ; pack up 
your damned clarinets," Sec. (Fashionable Lover, 
Act I. Sc. I.) 

" There's bonds, and blanks, and bargains, and 
promissory notes, and a damned sight of rogueries." 
(Ibid, Act II. Sc. I.) 

" Where's your religion and be damned to you ?" 
(The Brothers, Act I. Sc. I.) 

" Never put up with an affront damme." — 
64 An antiquated goddess of fifty : Damme I'll make 
up to her." — " Damme if I would not as soon 
comb out the tower lions," &c. — " That damn d 
old quiz of a coat you're dusting." — " Damnd 
old quiz of a coat ! Damme how you barbers 
swear !" (Box Lobby Challenge, Act I. Sc. I. 
and II. the last four uttered in little more than as 
many lines). 

" Damn you for a dunce, what are you think- 



592 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

ing of?" — ■" Married to your son of a bitch of a 
bear leader." (Ibid, Act IF. Sc. II J 

" Father is damn* d close in the lockers." (First 
Love, Act I. Sc. I J 

" Damnation! then there are more repairs on 
my hands than a broken carriage/' (Ibid, Act II. 
Sc. II ) 

" For damme if you don't tread upon your 
grave/' — " Damnation ! does the world contain 
such villainy ?" (Ibid, Act IV. Sc. II) 

" Damn it, do you think I would stand by and 
hear my master abused ?" (Jew, Act IV. Sell) 

" She's a damn d slippery jade," &c. (The 
West Indian, Act II. Sc. IV.) 

" Damn them! I would there was not such a 
bauble in nature/' — " Hell and vexation! get out 
of the room." (Ibid, Act III. Sc. II.) 

" Damn it ! never while you live draw your 
sword before a woman." (Ibid, Act IV. Sc. II )\ 

" There's a damnd deal of mischief brewing 
between this hyena and her lawyer." (Ibid, 
Act IV. Sc. II) 

" He began to blast her at a furious rate/' 
(Observer, No. 88.) 

The reader will willingly believe, I trust, that I 
could have been tempted to this partial enume- 
ration of oaths, employed by Cumberland in his 
dramatic writings, only as it was calculated to refute 
a very positive and a very important praise be- 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. .593 

stowed upon him by a man, whose praise is too 
valuable to be lavished with impropriety. 

For the following sketch of Cumberland's collo- 
quial talents I am indebted to the obliging kind- 
ness of Mr. Hewson Clarke, a gentleman asso 
ciated with him in the London Review , and to 
whom, as he has told me, Cumberland intended 
to confide some private documents and papers for 
publication after his death. This scheme, how- 
ever^ his sudden decease frustrated. 

" The colloquial efforts of Mr. Cumberland 
were in no degree above the ordinary level. He 
was not peculiarly distinguished for the profundity 
of his detached observations, or the brilliancy of 
his occasional repartees ; to warm or extended 
argument he had an invincible aversion, and na- 
ture had denied him the polished fluency of his 
friend Sir James Bland Burges. He never led the 
conversation of his social circle, or sustained its 
vigour by the animation of his influence. Yetj 
his casual remarks, when they were not distin- 
guished by acuteness or brilliance, were charac- 
terised by that terse felicity of expression which 
constitutes the chief excellence of his Memoirs; if 
he did not predominate in conversation, he gave 
relief to the colloquial contests of more ambitious 
speakers, and if he seldom poured forth the treasures 
*>f his own intellectual stores, he displayed pecu- 
liar dexterity in the formation of hints, and the 

2Q 



394 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

application of questions, that might call into dis- 
play the natural or acquired endowments of his 
friends. 

" It may account, in some degree, for the ex- 
tent of his colloquial reputation, that his deport- 
ment was in the highest degree impressive and 
engaging. The smile that played upon his lip 
embellished many a common-place sentiment, and 
the graceful, yet dignified elegance of his address, 
gave weight to opinions that from a less favoured 
speaker would have been received with contemp- 
tuous silence or acquiescent indifference. Though 
a Johnson might, in the presence of Cumberland, 
have felt his own superiority, he would not have 
ventured to display it: even while he unconsci- 
ously unveiled the less amiable features of his 
character, he averted the resentment of his audi- 
tors, or softened their dislike by the fascination of 
his manner, and those who could not but acknow- 
ledge his susceptibility to the minor vices, were 
astonished, on reflection, at the coldness of their 
dislike, and the reluctance of their condemnation. 

" He was so fond of flattery himself that he sup- 
posed it to be acceptable to his friends, even in 
the most disgusting form, or in the most exuberant 
proportions. He was the easy and delighted dupe 
of every juvenile parasite, who found it convenient 
to barter adulation for patronage ; and the firsj 
number of the London Review bears melancholy 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 595 

"evidence, that his own fame, and the gratification 
of the public, were not of sufficient importance to 
outweigh the grateful drivelling, or the fawning 
meanness of a youthful protege, ' who melted the 
last guinea into a picture-frame for his honoured 
portrait, to be hung as a reverential monitor above 
his chimney-piece/ " 

My opinions upon Cumberland's literary cha- 
racter have been so fully delivered in the course of 
this work, that any general expression of them is 
rendered superfluous. His writings were numer- 
ous, but unequal, and a very small portion of 
them will be required by posterity. What he 
published, however, was only a part of what he 
actually composed, and we may expect, from his 
daughter, some of his posthumous pieces. Before 
he died he solicited, in an humble address on the 
cover of the European Magazine^ the subscrip- 
tions of his friends and the public, to a quarto 
edition of his unpublished dramas, and I have 
been told that the present Lord Lonsdale and Sir 
James Graham, generously answered the appeal, 
by sending, each of them, a hundred pound bank 
note, as the amount of their subscription, politely 
expressing, at the same time, their regret that 
Cumberland should have been compelled to so great 
a humiliation. This munificence deserves to be 
recorded, and I feel a pleasure in doing it. Some 

2Q2 



596 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

progress in the printing of these plays has been 
madej for they are announced, at the end of the 
poem of Retrospection, as being in the press ; and 
I am informed it is Mrs. Jansen's intention shortly 
to give them to the world. 

Cumberland's family consisted, at his death, of 
two sons and three daughters. Both the sons are 
in the service of their king and country. The 
one, Charles, who married the daughter of General 
Matthew, is in the army, and the other, William, 
a post-captain in the navy. His first and second 
sons, Richard and George, died abroad ; Richard, 
(who married the eldest daughter of the late Earl 
of Buckinghamshire), at Tobago, and George, in 
America, where he was killed at the siege of 
Charlestown. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth y 
married Lord Edward Bentinck, brother to the late 
Duke of Portland ; his second, Sophia, married 
William Badcock^ Esq. a gentleman of whom Cum- 
berland speaks in no manner calculated to excite 
esteem. Of his third daughter, Frances Marianne, 
I need not repeat what has been already told. 
Besides this immediate posterity, he numbered 
nineteen grandchildren, " some of whom," he says, 
u have already lived to crown my warmest wishes, 
and I see a promise in the rest, that flatters my 
most sanguine hopes/' 

By his will he bequeathed the whole of his pro- 
perty to his- youngest daughter; and as the reader 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 597 

may wish to peruse this document, I have trans- 
cribed it : 

" Will of Richard Cumberland. 

11 In the name of God, Amen. Conscious that 
I am of sound mind, I declare myself to be com- 
petent in all intellectual qualifications for making 
this my last Will and Testament. Whereas my 
first cousin, George Ashby, of Haselbeach, in the 
county of Northampton, Esquire, did solemnly 
promise and assure me, that he would by will 
provide for my youngest daughter, Frances Mari- 
anne, which promise and solemn assurance he gave 
to me, when last I was at his house, upon the death 
of my sister, Mrs. Mary Alcock ; and whereas the 
said George Ashby, Esquire, has since deceased 
without fulfilling that his solemn promise and 
assurance given in behalf of my daughter, I do 
hereby give and devise to her Frances Marianne, 
my daughter, all my real and personal estates, 
property, goods, chattels, books, manuscripts, or 
by whatever other designation the law may inter- 
pret them, to her sole use and behoof, subject, 
however, to the payment of my debts. 

" And whereas I am intitled, by my mission to 
Spain, to expect some compensation or pension to 
my relict or relicts, after my decease, I do hereby 
direct my said daughter Marianne, to make appli- 
cation to the proper office for the same, through 



598 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

the means of such friend or friends as she can in- 
tercede with and prevail upon to undertake that 
friendly task, for the sake of her deceased father, 
and may God in his mercy reward the generous 
friend, whoever it shall be, who gives her that be- 
nevolent assistance ! 

" Now with respect to my manuscripts, 1 re- 
commend her to consult and advise with the three 
following friends of me, whilst living, and who I 
trust will not desert my interest with posterity 
when I am dead ; these are Sir James Bland Sur- 
ges, Baronet, Richard Sharpe, Esquire, of Mark- 
lane, merchant, and Samuel Rogers, Esquire, of 
Park-place, banker ; — I pray and entreat of them 
to select, arrange, collect, compile, and put toge- 
ther, in form and order, as to their judgments shall 
seem best, my works, which are unpublished ; my 
manuscripts, which they may deem worthy to be 
published, either by subscription, or how else, for 
her use and benefit ; imploring the Almighty God 
to bless them for the charitable work, the assurance 
of which even now gives peace and comfort to my 
soul. 

" I pray my children and grandchildren not to 
take in ill part this my will in favour of an unmar- 
ried child, who has not, like them, a profession to 
resort to, but would be left to the wide world un- 
friended and forlorn, without the little I may have 
to bequeath to her, deserted as she now is by the 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 599 

relation on whose word I confidently built my 
hopes. I desire her, at her own discretion, to give 
from my personal effects or pictures, or whatever 
else she may have in possession, some token or 
tokens, to every one of my sons, my daugh- 
ters, and my grandson, Richard Cumberland, on 
whom 1 devoutly invoke the protection and favour 
of my all-merciful God. 

" I have lived in charity with all men; I have 
met unkindness, but never relented it ; I know 
not what revenge is. Such talents as God gave 
me I have devoted to his service, and the moral 
and religious edification of my fellow-creatures. I 
have loved my God, my Country, and my Friend. 
When Mr. Ashby deceived me, it wounded my 
heart, but it has not shaken my confidence in 
others. 

" In my faith as a Christian I am firm. I have 
published my sentiments ; I am sincere in them ;- 
I am no hypocrite. 

Cfc 1 declare this to be my last will and testament, 
signed and witnessed as below, and God forbid any 
who inherit one drop of my blood should litigate 
or dispute it. Take notice, I interlined Frances 
twice with my own hand, having overlooked it. 

" In witness whereof I have hereunto set my 
hand and seal, this fourth day of April, in the year 
of our Lord, eighteen hundred and two. 

(L.S.) " Richard Cumberland.. 



600 LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 

" Signed and sealed, published and declared, by 
the said testator, as and for his last will and testa- 
ment, in the presence of us, who, in his presence, 
and at his request, have hereunto set our names 
as witnesses thereunto, 

" Henry Fry, Solicitor, Tunbridge Wells, 
" Thomas Camis, Tunbridge Wells, 
*' James Camis, Tunbridge Wells." 

The above was proved in the Consistorial and 
Episcopal Court of the Lord Bishop of London, 
the 22d day of October, IS 11, by Frances Mari- 
anne Jansen, widow (formerly Cumberland), the 
daughter of the said deceased ; the sole executrix 
according to the tenor of the said will. 

Property sworn under <£4>50. 

When I animadverted at p. 476, of this work, 
upon the seeming impropriety of disregarding Cum- 
berland's particular and public request, that the 
protection of his posthumous papers should be 
confided to his three friends, Sir James Bland 
B urges, Mr. Sharpe, and Mr. Rogers, I had not 
seen his will : and I will freely own that my asto- 
nishment was greatly heightened when I found in 
it that request not only repeated, but solemnly 
enforced by the pathetic declaration, that the anti- 
cipation of their kind offices " gave peace and 



LIFE OF CUMBERLAND. 601 

comfort to his soul." When, however, after reading 
this declaration, I remember that the daughter to 
whom he has entrusted the fulfilment of all his 
other bequests, has declined the interference of 
those friends, I can only hope that some private 
motive, powerful beyond what I can easily con- 
ceive, and into which I have no right to examine, 
has influenced her decision. I should be happy, 
indeed, to hear that it is so ; for the wishes of the 
dead are too sacred, too impressive, and too impor- 
tant sometimes, not to make every man desirous that 
they should be reverentially obeyed by the living; 
and it is from the operation of this feeling alone 
that I have expressed my opinion upon so delicate 
a topic. 



INDEX, 



INDEX. 



A. 

JrLDDlSON, remarks on Tickell's elegy on his death, 86, 87. 

Adultery, iniquitous proceedings of those who publish trials for, 449. 

Affectation, lines upon, by Cumberland, notice of, 581. 

Ancestors of Cumberland, See Bentley and Cumberland. 

Anecdotes of Spanish Painters, by Cumberland, notice of, 397. 

Anecdotes, remarkable, of the thief who stole Dr. Bentley's plate, 19. Of 
Dr Bentley, not generally known, 23. Of Dr. Thompson, Dodington's 
body-physician, 111,112. Of Dr. Goldsmith, 263—269. Of Count Kau- 
nitz, 361. Of Lord Sackville, 484—489. Of Cumberland and a book- 
seller, 586. 

Anonymous Criticism, remarks on its abuses, 569 — 573. 

Armageddon, a poem by Mr.Townsend, absurd examination of, by Cum- 
berland, 574, 575. 

Armourer, a comic opera, by Cumberland, See Wat Tyler. 

Arundel, a novel by Cumberland, remarks on, 493 — 504. Holds a distin- 
guished place among his writings, 493. Character in, 494 — 497, 499 
—501. Parts of this work indelicate, if not indecent, 503. Justifi- 
cation of, by Cumberland, ib. 

Ashhy, Edmund, receives Cumberland to board with him in Peter Street, 
Westminster, 54. 

Atterbury, Bishop, anecdote of, 38. 

B. 

Badcock, William, Esq. marries Cumberland's second daughter, Sophia, 
596. Not well spoken of by Cumberland, ib. 

Banishment of Cicero, a tragedy by Cumberland, 124. Remarks on, 124, 
125. Complimentary letter from Bishop Warburton on, 125, 126. Ex- 
tracts from, 127, 128. Presented to Garrick by Lord Halifax, 129. 
Rejected by him, 129. 

Barnes, Joshua, Dr. Bentley's opinion of, 37. 

Battle of Hastings, remarks on Cumberland's tragedy of, 322 — 334. Imi- 
tations of Shakspeare in, 325 — 328. 



'604 INDEX. 

Beckford, Mr. Alderman, character of, 118. 

Bentinch, Lord Edward, son to the late Duke of Portland, marries Cum- 
berland's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, 596. 
Bentley, Dr. Richard, an illustrious ancestor of Cumberland, 11. His 
vast erudition, arrogance, and controversial ability, ib. His skill in 
verbal criticism consigned to contempt, by Pope, ib. His sagacity as a 
critic, ib. Preposterous emendations of Milton, ib. Sublime discoveries 
in science, ib. His domestic character placed in an amiable light, 12. 
His hat of formidable dimensions, 13. The promoter of the childish 
sports of Cumberland and bis sister, 14. His gentle rebuke for making 
a noise over his library, 16. Observation upon the argument of Cum- 
berland, that he never slept, 17. Bishop Lowth's appellation of him, ib. 
His ordinary style of conversation, ib. His conduct to candidates, 
while holding examinations for fellowships, 17, 18. Anecdote of the 
thief who stole his plate, 19. His liberal assistance to Collins, the in- 
fidel, 20. Acquainted with Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Mead, Dr. Wallis, 
Baron Spanheim, Roger Cotes, &c. ib. Particularly amused with the 
character of Sir Roger de Coverley, in the Spectator, 21 . His curious 
apology for devoting his time to criticism, 21, 22. Took no account of 
pecuniary matters, 22. His controversy with the Bishop of Ely, 23. 
Curious plagiarism of Pope, in his Essay on Man, from a sermon of Dr. 
Bentley's, 24, 26. His youngest daughter Joanna, the Phcebe of Byron's 
Pastoral, 30. Reply to Arthur Kinsman, 36. Death of, lamented by 
Cumberland, 37. His opinion of Joshua Barnes, ib, ; of Pope's Homer, 
38, 39 ; of Warburton, 38. 
Bentley, Mrs. wife of Dr. Richard Bentley, 22. Daughter of Sir John 
Bernard, ib. Related to the Cromwells and Saint Johns, ib. Her 
manners tinctured with hereditary reserve, ib. Piety of her life — 
death, ib. 
Betty, Master, remarks on his acting, 467. 
Bickerstaf, Cumberland's controversy with, 159, 160. 
Blackmore, opinion of, by Locke, 89. 

Bland Surges, Sir James, warmly commended by Cumberland, 475. As- 
sociated with him, in the composition of the Exodiad, ib., 564, 565. 
Assistance expected from, in this Life of Cumberland, 566. His poem of 
Richard Coeur de Lion, written with more rapidity than Pope translated 
Homer, 583. His reputation as an author considered, 583, 584. Cum- 
berland's posthumous papers bequeathed to him, Mr. Sharpe, and Mr. 
Rogers, 598. 
Blank verse, remarks on, 57. 
v Box Lobby Challenge, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. A humorous 
^ epilogue written for, by George Colman, 547. 



INDEX. 605 

Brothers, 7%e, a play by Cumberland, account of, and remarks on its cha- 
racters, 169 — 177. Original characters in, 171. Mrs. Inchbald's opi- 
nion of, 172. Controverted, ib. Cumberland's opinion of, 173. Deli- 
cate flattery of Garrick in the epilogue, 175. The prologue makes many 
enemies, 176. 

Buckinghamshire, Earl of, his eldest daughter married to Cumberland's 
son, Richard, 596. 

Burges, Sir James Bland, See Bland Burges. 

Burke, Edmund, comparison between him and Dr. Johnson, in the 

- poem of Retrospection, 247—249. Observations on his style, 251, 252. 
Warburton's opinion of, 252. His pamphlet on the Revolution admired 
by Cumberland, 538. 

Burleigh, Lord, his opinion of Spenser, 89. 

C. 

Calvary, a poem by Cumberland, remarks and critique on, 526—- -539. 
Ranked by Dr. Drake with Paradise Lost, 527, 528. Examination of 
the claim, 528, 529. Cumberland's opinion of, 523. 

Calypso, remarks on Cumberland's opera of, 340, 341. 

Camoens' Lusiad, and Mickle's translation, remarks upon, 103. Poem of 
Cumberland's on the same subject, 104 — 107. 

Caractacus, by Mason, remarks on, 72 — 74. A drama of this name, 
written by Cumberland, 77. 

Carmelite, remarks on Cumberland's tragedy of, 468 — 470* Extract from 
the prologue to, 468. Dedicated to Mrs. Siddoas, 466. Extract from 
the epilogue, spoken by Mrs. Siddons, 470. 

Chatham, Earl of, command to his son, 61. 

Choleric Man, observations on Cumberland's drama of, 306 — 312. Exami- 
nation of the dramatis personce, 307 — 3 1 1 . Dedicated to Detraction, 311, 

Chorus, Greek, remarks on, 73—77. 

Oiristian Revelation, tract on, by Cumberland, noticed, 540, 541. Con- 
clusion of, 541 — 545. 

Clare, Lord, his criticism upon the West Indian, 207. 

Clarke, Mr. Hew son, sketch of Cumberland's colloquial talents, 593. 

Clergyman, political, not a consistent character, 79. 

Clonfert, Cumberland's father promoted to the see of, 142. Episcopal 
residence described, 165—168. Fairies prevalent at, 196. Catholic priest 
of, 197. 

Coats, Mr., tribute to, 465. 

Collins, the infidel, Dr. Beatley's liberal assistance to, 20. 

Colman, tries how far he of scenic effect might contribute to the adop- 
tion of Elfrida, 76, 



606 INDEX. 

Colman, George, writes a humourous epilogue for the Box Lohby Chal- 
lenge, 547. 

Comedy, sentimental, a defence of, 281. 

Contemplatist, a series of essays, extract from, 447, 448. 

Cotes, Roger, a friend of Dr.Bentley, 20. 

Country Attorney, a comedy by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 

Crane, Reverend Mr., an inmate in Lord Halifax's family, 92. Formerly 
his lordship's tutor, ib. His opinions listened to with submissive de- 
ference, ib. Rejects the offer of Elphin bishopric, 137. 

Criticism, anonymous, remarks on, 569 — 573. 

Cro?nek, Mr., Cumberland's unsolicited exertions in behalf of his picture 
of Chaucer's Pilgrims, 576. 

Cumberland, Bishop, paternal great-grandfather of the subject of these 
memoirs, 2. A man of conscientious feelings, primeval integrity, and 
eminent for his acquirements as a scholar, ib. Son of a citizen of Lon- 
don; educated at St. Paul's school ; takes his degree at Cambridge, ib. 
First intention to study physic, ib. Directs his views to the church, 3. 
obtains a living at Stamford ; loved and respected for the unaffected 
piety of his manners, 4. Publishes his work, De Legibus Nature;, &c. 
ib. This work recommended by Johnson, ib. Nominated Bishop of 
Peterborough, 5. First intelligence of this nomination conveyed to him 
by a paragraph in the newspapers, ib. Hesitates to accept it, ib. 
Prevailed on by his friends, 5, 6. Finds leisure to prosecute his literary 
studies, 6. Spends much time in examining Sanchoniatho's Phoenician 

- History, 7. A zealous supporter of the established religion, ib. His 
bookseller refuses to publish Sanchoniatho's Fragment, 8. Published 
by his son-in-law, after his death, 9. Lives to an advanced age, ib. 
His death gentle, ib. Character by his grandson, 9 — 11. 

Cumberland, Richard, Esq. descended from a literary stock, 1 . Improved 
the possession bequeathed to him by his ancestors, 1 , 2. Proud of the 
literary honours of his family, 2. His ancestors, ib. Literary world 
indebted to, for anecdotes of Dr. Bentley, 12. How far his Memoirs are 
used in the present work, 27, 28. A pleasing accumulation of literary 
anecdote, 28. -The circumspection, with which he alludes to his own 
conduct, 29. Could not write his own life, so as to preclude the present 
attempt, 30. Born Feb. "1732, in the Master's Lodge of Trinity Col- 
lege, ib. His account of his parents, 31, 32. His mother quick in ap- 
prehension, 31. Fond of ridicule, ib. Never passed a day, without 
reading a portion of her Bible, ib. Her son's declaration concerning 
her, 32. His father educated at Westminster School, 34. Admitted 
;Fellow- commoner of Trinity-College, Cambridge, ib. Married at the age 
of twenty-two, ib. Prevailed upon to take the rectory of Stanwick, ib. 



INDEX. 607 

His character, 34. Cumberland, inferior in years and knowledge, to 
his sister Joanna, 35. His confusion of ideas on reading the 115th 
Psalm, ib. Sent to the School of Bury St. Edmund's, in his sixth year, 
kept by Arthur Kinsman, ib. His inauspicious progress, ib. Produces 
his first attempt in English verse, 40. Spends his vacations at Stan- 
wick, with his father, 40, 41. Partakes the dangerous and unmanly 
sport of hunting with him, 41. Reads poetry to his mother, by which 
his ear was formed to poetical harmony, 43. These readings, chiefly 
from Shakspcare, 44. Writes a piece, called Shakspeare in the Shades, 
44. Description of, and extracts from, 44 — 50. Removed to West- 
minster School, 50. His contemporaries there, 50, 51. Labours with 
unremitting assiduity at his studies, 52. Boards with Edmund Ashby, 
Esq. in Peter-street, Westminster, 54. First witnesses the acting of 
Gajrick, 55. Attempts a translation from Virgil's Georgics, 56. Ex- 
tract from, 58. His sister, Joanna, dies of the small-pox, 59. Her loss 
severely felt, ib. He is sent to Trinity- College, Cambridge, ib. Names 
of his tutors, 60. Idleness, no part of his character, ib. Writes some 
elegiac verses on the death of the Prince of Wales, 63. Keeps an act, 
ib. Sleeps only six hours, lives chiefly on a milk diet, and uses the cold 
bath, ib. Attacked by a rheumatic fever, which keeps him six months 
hovering between life and death, 64. Is gratified by hearing from Cam- 
bridge of the high station adjudged him, among the Wranglers of his 
year, ib. Changes his undergraduate's gown, and obtains his degree of 
Bachelor of Arts, with honours hardly earned, 64. His remarks upon 
this species of academical education, 64—70. Conceives himself des- 
tined for the church, 70. Meditates upon a plan for a Universal His- 
tory, 71 . The plan abandoned, ib. Mason's Elfrida praised by him, 72. 
Visits a relation in Yorkshire, 80, 81. Attempts an imitation of Spen- 
ser's Fairy Queen, 81. Replies in a poem, of quatrains, to one written 
by Lady Susan, daughter of the Earl of Galloway, ib. The poem, 82-— 
84. Imitates Hammond, 84. Specimen of, 84, 85. Reprimanded by 
his mother for the practice of imitation, 85. Returns to Cambridge, 90. 
An alteration of the existing statutes of Trinity College, agreed upon in 
his favour, ib. Appointed confidential Secretary to Lord Halifax, 9L 
Hastens to London, and enters upon his new office, 93. Lodgings pro- 
vided for him in Downing-street, near Mr. Pownall's, ib. Pownall 
appointed to instruct Cumberland in the details of business, ib. A mere 
.man of office, ib. Cumberland, a mere collegian, ib. His vexation and 
disappointment, 94. Advised to inform himself respecting the colonies, 
95. Travels through volumes of useless knowledge, which told every 
thing, but what he wanted to know, ib. Various facts which he re- 
collected, employed as plots for his dramatic pieces, ib. Accompanies 



60S INDEX. 

his patron to Cambridge, ib. Has hopes of a fellowship, ib. His 
election opposed by Dr. Mason, ib. Obtains his fellowship, 96. Re- 
turns home, ib. Again immersed in the duties of his official situation, 
ib. Writes an elegy on St. Mark's Eve, published by Dodsley, ib. This 
passes into oblivion, ib. Excites the notice of Charles Townshend, by 
solving an enigma, which required a geometrical process, 97. A report 
submitted to him, by Townshend, ib; His poetical version of a passage 
in the Troades of Seneca, 98. Remarks on the continued strain of 
eulogy in Cumberland's Memoirs, IOC — 102. His intimacy with the 
grandson of Bishop Reynolds, 103. Affair of gallantry with his friend's 
sister, ibi Projects an epic poem on the discovery of India by the Por- 
tuguese, ib. Fragment of, 104 — 107. His grief for the death of Lord 
Halifax's wife, 108. Her character, ib. Attends Lord Halifax to Lon- 
don, ib* Visited by Mr. Higgs, ib. Visits Bishop Sherlock, 109. Be- 
comes a frequent guest at La Trappe, 112. Divides his leisure time 
between Fulham and La Trappe, ib. Visits Eastbury, the seat of Mr. 
Dodington j 113. Gains a lay-fellowship, 1 22> 1 23 . Writes the Banish- 
ment of Cicero, 124. Marries Miss Ridge, 130. Takes the rank of 
Ulster Secretary, 132. Has an offer of a baronetcy, 135. Rejects it, 
135, 136. His father promoted to the See of Clonfert, 143. Applies 
for the office of Under Secretary to Lord Halifax, 147. Rejected, ib. 
Reasons for it, ib. Retires from the employment of Lord Halifax, ib. 
Accepts the situation vacated by Mr. Sedgwicke, ib. His intercourse 
with Lord Halifax at an end, 149. Reflections on, ib. His felicity in 
being independent of booksellers, 158. Has a controversy with Bicker- 
staff, 159, 160. Roused to a pursuit of the legitimate drama, by the 
remonstrance of Smith, 161. Visits Ireland, accompanied by his wife, 
and part of his family, 162. Studies the Irish character, 164. Returns 
from Ireland, and brings out the comedy of the Brothers, 169. Some 
delicate flattery of Garrick in the epilogue, the cause of his acquaint- 
ance with this actor, 175, 176. The origin of Sir Fretful Plagiary, 178 
— 180. Visits his father, and projects the comedy of the West Indian^ 
187. Account of adventures which happened to him in Ireland, 191— 
201. Returns to England, and offers his West Indian to Garrick, 202. 
Enters the path of controversy, 218. Writes against Bishop Lowth, 
218, 219. Title of the pamphlet, 220. Loses a present sent to his 
uncle, as the presumed author of the tract, 222. Writes to the donor, 
222, 223. Made the heir of a distant relation, but ultimately disap- 
pointed, 223, 224. Cumberland's own account of this curious trans- 
action, 224 — 230. His celebrity from the performance of the West 
Indian, 235. Obtains him the society of Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, 
Reynolds, &e. ib. His temperate, but discriminate censure of Mr. 



INDEX. 609 

Walter Scott, 273—278. Produces the Fashionable Lover, 280. His. 
literary enterprises, suspended for a time by the death of his parents, 
301. His account of that event, 302—306. Produces his Choleric 
Man, 306. Writes two odes, one to the Sun, and one to Dr. James, 312, 
313. Alters and spoils Shakspeare's Timon of Athens, 313. Specimen 
of, 314. Writes the Note of Hand, a farce, 318. Fecundity of his 
muse, 319. Produces the Battle of Hastings, 320; An imitator of 
Shakspeare, 325 — 328. Introduced to Lord George Germain, 334, 335. 
Visits him at Stoneland, 337. Produces the opera of Calypso, 340. 
The Widow of Delphi, or the Descent of the Deities, 341. Writes 
the defence of Perreau, 342. Solicited to take the defence of Dr. 
Dodd, 342. Declines it, ib. Intimate with Lord Mansfield, 348. 
Addresses some lines to him, 348-— 351. Departs upon his Spanish 
mission, 352. A brief recapitulation of that affair, ib. Arrives at 
Aranjuez, 355. Fails in his undertaking, 357. Ignorance of an 
Ecclesiastic, 359. Vain of the notice he received from the Royal 
Family of Spain, 360. The society he kept at Madrid, 360, 361. Pe- 
riod of his recall, 367. Reflections upon Cumberland's account of this 
business, 369. The dangers of a pinch of snuff in Spain, 380 — 383. 
His forbearance in relating the treatment he received from the English 
government, 384. Addresses a memorial to Lord North, 385. . Its 
failure, 390. His remonstrance with Mr. Secretary Robinson, ib. Re- 
tires to Tunbridge, 392. Family that accompanied him, 396. Publishes 
his Anecdotes of Eminent Painters in Spain, $97. Accused of attacking 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, 398. Produces his comedy of the Walloons, 406. 
Produces* the Mysterious Husband, 413. Writes the Observer, 419. 
Argues against female acquirements, 423. His " few plain reasons 
for being a Christian," 428. His notions of Political Liberty, ib. Takes 
credit for the character of Abraham Abrahams in the Observer, 432. 
Example how his style might be improved, 451. The Observer will 
convey his name to posterity, 459. His inconsistency in his own state- 
ments about himself, 460. An apt quotation from La Fontaine, on this 
subject, 461. Controversy with Mr. Kayley, respecting the Life of 
Romney, 462. Publishes the tragedy of the Carmelite, 465. Enters 
into controversy with the Bishop of Landaff, 471. Publishes his pam- 
phlet of Curtius rescued from the Gulph y ib. Pleasing hours passed at 
Mr. Dilly's, ib. Becomes acquainted with Mr. Rogers there, 472. Sells 
the copyright of his Memoirs for <£500, 473. Leaves his unpublished 
papers to the care of Mr. Sharpe, Mr. Rogers, and Sir James Bland 
Burges, 475. This bequest frustrated by his daughter, Mrs. Janscn, 
476. Produces his Natural Son, 447. His excellence in prologues and 

2R 



610 INDEX, 

epilogues, 477. His rapidity of production, not inconsistent with ex- 
cellence, 490. Produces the comedy of the Impostors, 491. His novel 
of Arundel, 492. Of Henry, 505. His superiority in depicting the 
passion of Love, 519. Writes the novel of John de Lancaster, 521. 
The poem of Calvary, 526'. Renders 'fifty of the Psalms of David into 
English verse, 539. Publishes his few plain reasons, why we should 
believe in Christ, &c. ib. Enumeration of plays produced by him be- 
tween 1790 and 1808, 547. Three only deserve notice, ib. Peculiarity 
in his dramas, 561, 562. Writes his Memoirs, 563. Writes the Exo- 
diad, in conjunction with Sir J. B. Surges, 564. Edits the Select Bri- 
tish Drama, 568. Projects a weekly newspaper, ib. Publishes the 
London Review, 563. His absurd examination of Mr. Townsend's 
Armageddon, 574. His exertion in behalf of Mr. Cromek, 576. Writes 
his last work, the Retrospection, published a few days before his 
death, ib. Personal occurrences of his life enumerated, 580. Heads 
the Tunbridge volunteers, 581. Remonstrates with Mr. Hayley, 582. 
His adulation of Sir James Bland Burges, 583. Has an antipathy to 
Gray, 585. Passes much of his time at Ramsgate, 586. Writes his 
Memoirs there, ib. Anecdote of him and a bookseller, 587. His death, 
588. Buried in Westminster Abbey, 589. Address of Dr. Vincent on 
this occasion, ib. Objections to, 590. Instances of unmeaning and 
unnecessary oaths, used in Cumberland's works, 591, 592. Sketch of 
his colloquial talents, by Mr. Hewson Clarke, 593—595. Opinion of" 
his literary character, 595. Solicited, before he died, a subscription 
to a quarto edition of his unpublished dramas, ib. Shortly to be given 
to the world, 596. His family at his death, ib. Bequeaths his pro- 
perty to his youngest daughter, ib. His will, 597 — 600. His property 
sworn under ,£450, 600. The impropriety of disregarding his particular 
and public request, that his posthumous papers should be committed to 
the care of Sir James Bland Burges, Mr. Sharpe, and Mr. Rogers, con- 
sidered, ib. Concluding remarks, 601. 

For a further account of Cumberland's works, see the following 
articles : — Affectation, lines on, Anecdotes of Spanish Painters, Ar- 
mourer, Arundel, Banishment of Cicero, Battle of Hastings, Box Lobby 
Challenge, Brothers, Calvary, Calypso, Camoens, Caractacus, Carmelite, 
Choleric Man, Christian Revelation, Country Attorney, Curtius rescued 
from the Gulph, Days of Yore, Dependant, Don Pedro, Eccentric Lover, 
Exodiad, False Impressions, Fashionable Lover, First Love, Hammond, 
Henry, Hints to. Husbands, Impostors, Jew, Jew of Mogadpre, Joanna 
of Montfaucon, John de Lancaster, Last of the Family, London Review, 
Love for Love, Memoirs, Mysterious Husband, Natural Son, Note ©| 



INDEX, 611 

Hand, Observer, Odea, Plain Reasons for believing in Christ, Prince of 
Wales, elegiac verses on, Retrospection, Sailor's Daughter, Select Bri- 
tish Drama, Shakspeare in the Shades, St. Mark's Eve, elegy on, Sum- 
mer's Tale, Timon of Athens, Troades of Seneca, Tftnbridge, Virgil's 
Georgics, Walloons, Wat Tyler, West Indian, Wheel of Fortune, 
Widow of Delphi, Word for Nature. 

Cumberland, Charles, son of the above, marries the daughter of General 
Matthew, 596*. In the army, ib. 

William, a post captain in the navy, 596. 

Richard, marries the eldest daughter of the Earl of Bucking- 
hamshire, 596. Dies at Tobago, ib. 

■ George, killed at the siege of Charlestown in America, 596. 



Elizabeth, marries Lord Edward Bentinck, son to the late 

Duke of Portland, 596. 

— ..- Sophia, marries William Badcock, Esq. 596. 

Frances Marianne, notice of, 596 ; and see Jansen. 

— — — Joanna, Cumberland's eldest sister, character of, 35. Dies 



of the small-pox, 59. 
Curtius rescued from the Gulph, a pamphlet of Cumberland's directed 
against Dr. Parr, 471. 

D. 

Dance, Mr., tribute to, 465. 

Davies x Mr., remarks upon Cumberland's alteration of Shakspeare's 

Timon of Athens, 316, 317. Sneering scepticism of, reproved, 410. 
Days of Yore, a drama by Cumberland, notice of, 548. 
De Legibus Naiurce, written by Bishop Cumberland, 4. 
Dr. Mortuis nil nisi bonum, this maxim examined, 33. 
Dependant, the, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 
Dilly, Mr., suggestion at one of his literary dinners, 471. Pleasing hours. 

passed by Cumberland at, 471, 472. 
Dodington, Bubb, his splendid villa of La Trappe, 109, 110. His asso-. 

ciates there, 110 — 112. Dr. Thompson his body-physician, 111, 112. 

His seat at Eastbury described, 113, 114. His wardrobe and equipage, 

114, 115. His character, 116—118. Wrote small poems, 121. His 

diary, ib. His collection of anecdotes, repartees, &c, 121, 122. 
Don Pedro, a drama by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 
Drake, Dr., his opinion of Calvary, 527, 528. His competency as a critic, 

examined, 529 — 531. 
Dramatic Author, popularity attending a successful one, in preceding 

times, 23 1 . Causes of this, and of the decay of that popularity, 232—235. 
Drydep, mock-criticism of Mr. Pinkerton on, 435. 

2R 2 



612 



INDEX. 



Dublin, state of society in, 139. 

Duelling, arguments in defence of, 496. Extract from Nubilia on, 497, 
498. Attempts to institute a Court of Honour, 496, 497. 

E. 

Eastbury, the seat of Mr. Dodington, described, 113, 114. 

Eccentric Lover, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 

Ecclesiastic, in Spain, ignorance of, 359. 

Elfrida, by Mason, praised much by Cumberland, 72. Remarks on, 72, 75, 

Elphin, Bishopric of, offered to Dr. Crane, 137. Rejected, Jb. 

Ely, Bishop of, controversy of Bentley with, 23. 

Encomiums, upon the dead, always to be suspected, 32, 33. 

Enigma, which required a geometrical process, solved by Cumberland, 
97. 

Epic Poem, on the discovery of India by the Portuguese, projected by 
Cumberland, 103. Remarks on Camoens, and his translator, ib. Frag- 
ment of Cumberland's poem, 104—107. Calvary, S26— 529. Exodiad, 
564. 

Eseurial, Cumberland's account of, superseded by more recent travels, 
359, 360. 

Essay on Man, curious plagiarism in, from a sermon of Dr. Bentley's, 
24—26. 

European Magazine, solicitation of Cumberland in, 595. 

Exodiad, a poem written by Cumberland, in conjunction with Sir Jamefc 
Bland Burges, remarks on, 564. Opinion of the work, 565. 

Eyre, Lord, his character, 192, 193. 

F. 

Fame, histrionic, fleeting qualities of, 54. Brevity of, feelingly enforced 
by Schiller, 55. 

False Impressions, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 548. 

Fashionable Lover, observations on Cumberland's drama of, 284 — 300. 
Prologue to, applauded, 288. Extract from, 288 — -290. Action of, skil- 
fully contrived, 289. Colin Macleod, total failure of this character, 
290. Bridgemore, 292. Mortimer, 295. Lord Abberville, Tyrrel, Dr. 
Druid and Aubrey, 297. Language of this drama, 298. 

Faulkner, George, his character, 141 — 143. Prosecutes Foote for lam- 
pooning him on the stage of Dublin, 143. 

Female Education, modern, defective system of, 41— -43. 

First Love, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. Inferior to the J,ew or 
Wheel of Fortune, 557. Its characters examined, 557 — 560. Mrs. 
Jjachbald's observations on, 558. Extract from this drama, 559. 



INDEX. 613 

Florida Blanca, County letter to Cumberland, 371. 
Fox, Mr. Henry, character of, 118. 

G. 

•Gainsborough, Mr., tribute to, 465. 

Galloway, Earl of, a poem written by Cumberland, in answer to one of 
his daughter's, Lady Susan G., 82 — 84. 

Garrick, remarks on his acting, 55, 56. Rejects Cumberland's tragedy 
of the Banishment of Cicero, 129. Delicate flattery of, in the epilogue 
to the Brothers, 175. Cumberland's acquaintance with, 175, 176. His 
corrections in the West Indian, 203. 

Gauden, Bishop, extract from his life of Hooker, 456. 

Germain, Lord George, succeeds the Earl of Halifax, in the colonial de- 
partment, 334, 335. Cumberland's account of an interview with, 335. 
His seat at Stoneland, 337. 

Gibbon, his own biographer, 28. Has produced a dignified narrative, ib. 
An adequate life of, much desired, 29. 

Glover, Mr. author of Leonidas, an occasional visitor at La Trappe, 111. 
MS. copy of his Medea, in the possession of Dodington, 120, 121. 

Goldsmith, Dr., his portrait by Cumberland, 256 — 259. Defence of his 
histories, 260 — 262. Of his Animated Nature, 262. Anecdotes of, 263 — 
269. His Vicar of Wakefield sold for sixty guineas, 269. Cumberland's 
mistake concerning, ib. Extract from his poem of Retaliation, 270. His 
epitaph on Cumberland contains more censure than praise, 271, 272. 
Cumberland's sketch of, in his Retrospection, 272. His style examined 
and praised, 447. 

Graham, Sir James, his handsome present to Cumberland, 595. 

Gray, Mr., his opinion of the Nouvelle Heloise of Rousseau, 90. Cum- 
berland's antipathy to, 585. 

Greaves, Mr. Commissary, anecdpte of, 19. Cumberland's letter to, 222. 

H. 

Halifax, Earl of. Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire, 80. Appoints 
Cumberland his confidential secretary, 91. A collateral descendant of 
a celebrated nobleman of that name, ib. A distinguished statesman 
and scholar, 91, 92. Fond of English poetry, 92. Married to a lady 
with a large fortune, from whom he takes the name of Dunk, ib. 
Crane, an elderly clergyman, an inmate in the family, ib. Formerly 
his lordship's tutor, ib. His opinions listened to with submissive de- 
ference, ib. Accompanies Cumberland to Cambridge, 95. Loses his 
wife, 108. Her character, ib. Accompanies Cumberland to London, 
ib. Made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 131. Accompanied by " single 
•speech Hamilton," ib. Circumstance highly to his honour, 133, 134, 



6l4 INDEX. 

Presents Cumberland's father to the see of Clonfert, 143. Receives the 

seals of Secretary of State, 146. Appoints Mr. Sedgwicke his under 

secretary, ib. Rejects the offer of Cumberland, 147. Reasons for it, ib. 

His intercourse with Cumberland terminated, 149. Reflections on, ib. 

Character of, by Cumberland, 152 — 154. His death, 334. Succeeded 

by Lord George Germain, ib. 
Hamilton, Gerard, chief secretary to Lord Halifax, 131. Known by the 

name of " Single-speech," 132. His character, 136. 
Hammond's Elegies, specimen of imitation of, by Cumberland, 84, 85- 

Remarks on Hammond, 85, 86. Criticism of Dr. Johnson upon, with 

observations, 87, 88. Vindicated from the aspersions of Dr. Johnson, 

88—90. 
Hayley, Mr., controversy between him and Cumberland, respecting the 

life of Romney, 462. Attacks Cumberland, for his character of Bentley, 

582. Answered by him, ib. 
Henderson, the actor, account of, by Cumberland, 406—410. The cha- 
racter of Father Sullivan, in the Walloons, written for him, 406. 
Henry, a novel by Cumberland, advertisement to, 506. The initial 
chapters borrowed from Fielding, 507. Its characters examined, 508— 
521. Extracts from, 512 — 514. Must always be read with pleasure, 520. 
Higgs, Rev. Mr., visits Cumberland, 108. 
Hid, Sir John, defence of, 259, 260. 
Hillsborough, Earl of, letter to Cumberland, 368. 
Hints to Husbands, a drama, by Cumberland, notice of, 548. Defect in> 

560,561. Characters examined, 561. 
Holberg, his own biographer, 28. Has produced a lively narrative, 

and communicated as much as posterity wish to know of him, ib. 
Honour, Court of, attempts to institute, 496, 497. 

Hoppner, Mr., gives his opinion of Mr. Croraek's picture of Chaucer's 
Pilgrims, 576. 

I. 

Idolatry P the capital error of the Romish church, 7. Earliest accounts of, 
in Sanehoniatho's Phoenician History, 8. 

Impostors, remarks on Cumberland's comedy of, 491 . Characters in, 491, 
492. Very inferior to his other plays, ib. 

Jnchbald, Mrs., her mode of criticism, 214, 215. Opinion of the Jew, 55 1 . 
False position of, controverted, 552. Her sensible observations on the 
Wheel of Fortune, 555. Remarks on First Love, examined and cen- 
sured, 558 — 560. 

Inscriptions, monumental, infidelity of, 33. 

Ireland, travelling in, 163, 



INDEX. 615 

J. 

James, Dr., extract from Cumberland's ode to, 313. 

Jansen, Mrs., frustrates the bequest of Cumberland, her father, 476. Sur- 
prise at, ib. Loses her huband in the ill-fated expedition to Walcheren., 
579. Remarks on her declining- the interference of Sir James Bland 
Burges, Mr. Sharpe, and Mr. Rogers, 601. 

Jew, the, a play by Cumberland, notice, 547. Examination of the cha- 
racters in, 549, 550. Mrs. Tnchbald's opinion of, 551. False position 
of ber's controverted, 552. 

Jew of Mogadore, an opera by Cumberland, notice of, and remarks on, 
547, 548. 

Joanna of Montfaucon, a drama by Cumberland, notice of, 548. Not men- 
tioned by him, ib. Adapted from Kotzebue, ib. Extract from the 
prologue, ib. 

John de Lancaster, remarks upon Cumberland's novel of, 521—524. In- 
ferior to Henry and Arundel, 521. Plot and characters examined, 521 
— 525. Exhibits symptoms of mental decay, 522. 

Johnson, Dr., his criticism upon Hammond's Elegies, with observations on 
it, 87, 88. Cumberland's character of, 236 — 244. Adumbration of, in 
the Observer, 244. Comparison between him and Burke in the poem 
of Retrospection, 247 — 249. A better Greek scholar, than insinuated 
by Cumberland, 250, 251. 

K. 

Kaunitz, Count, pleasing anecdote of, 361. 

Keinble, Mr., tribute to his excellence as an actor, 466, 467. His per- 
formance of Penruddock contributes to the popularity of the Wheel oH 
Fortune, 553. 

Kilmore, Cumberland's father translated to the see of, 146. 

Kinsman, Arthur, master of the school at Bury St. Edmunds, 35. Re- 
proves Cumberland, 36. Knew how to make his boys scholars, 52. 

L. 

La Fontaine, quotation from, on the subject of Cumberland's incon- 
sistency in his statements, 461. 

Landaff, Bishop of, Cumberland's controversy with, 471. 

Last of the Family, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 

La Trappe, a splendid villa of Bubb Dodington's, in the parish of Ham- 
mersmith, 109, 110. Description of its visitants, 109 — 112. 

Locke, Jolm, opinion of Blackmore, 89. 

London Review, the first number of, published by Cumberland, 569. 
Abuses of anonymous criticism considered, 569 — 573. Fate of 573.- 



616 INDEX. 

Articles written in, by Cumberland, 574. His absurd examination of 

Mr. Townsend's Armageddon, 574, 575. 
Lonsdale, Lord, his handsome present to Cumberland, 595. 
Love, Cumberland's superiority in depicting the passion of, 519. 
Love for Love, Cumberland's strictures on, noticed, 568. 
Lowth, BisJtop, appellation of Dr. Bentley, 17. Title of the pamphlet 

written against, by Cumberland, 220. 
Lyttleton, Lord, his criticism upon the West Indian, 207. 

M. 

Mansfield, Earl of, lines addressed to, by Cumberland, 343—351. 

Mason, Dr., opposes Cumberland's election to a fellowship, 95. His 
reasons for it, 95, 96. 

Matthew, General, his daughter married to Charles Cumberland, 596. 

Mead, Dr., a friend of Dr. Bentley, 20. 

Memoirs, self- written, considerations on, 127. 

~- of Cumberland, how far used in the present work, 27, 28. A 

pleasing accumulation of literary anecdote, 28. Remarks on the con- 
tinued strain of eulogy in, 100, 101. Miss Seward's opinion of, 181. 
Motives for the extracts from, 255. Public indebted to Mr. Sharpe for 
the suggestion of, 473. Copy-right of, sold for 500Z. ib. Notice of, 564, 
565. Pleasing accession of anecdote in the supplement to, 583. Great 
part of the Memoirs written at Ramsgate, 586. 

Menander, observations on, 283. 

Mengs, the Spanish painter, Cumberland's critique on, 398. 

Mickle's translation of Camoen's Lusiad, remarks on, 103. Fragment of 
a poem on the same subject by Cumberland, 104—107. 

Minden, Lord Sackville's solemn declaration respecting the affair of, 
489. 

Moliere, quotation from applicable to Cumberland, 567. 

Murphy, Arthur, his remarks on Cumberland's alteration of Shakspeare's 
Timon of Athens, 316. 

Mysterious Husband, remarks on Camberland's tragedy of, 413 — 418. 

. Epilogue to, 417. 

N. 
Natural Son, a comedy by Cumberland, prologue to, 478. Remarks ofl 

its characters, language, and sentiments, 479—484. 
Neivton, Sir Isaac, a friend of Dr- Bentley, 20. Anecdote of, 70. 
Nichols, Dr., master of Westminster School, had the art of making his 

scholars gentlemen, 52. 
North, Z/o?Y/,|Cumberland's memorial to, 385. 



INDEX. 617 

Note of Hand, or a Trip to Newmarket, a farce by Cumberland, acted 

with moderate applause, 318. 
Nottingham, contested election for the county of, 78. 
Novels, remarks on, 492, 493. Written by the greatest men, 493. 
Nubilia, extract from, on duelling, 497, 498. 
Nugent, Lord, his criticism upon the West Indian, 207. 

Oaths, unmeaning and unnecessary, instances of, in Cumberland's works, 
591. 

Observer, adumbration of Dr. Johnson, in, 244. Begun by Cumberland 
during his residence at Tunbridge, 419. Comparison of this work with 
the essays of Johnson, Addison, and Steele, 419. Examination of some 
particular papers in this work, 422. The religious papers commended, 
427. Character of Abraham Abrahams written upon principle, 432. 
Mock criticism on Othello, anticipated by Mr. Pinkerton, 433. Speci- 
men of, 437. General character of the Observer, 441 . Examination of 
its style, 444 — 446. A work that will convey Cumberland's name to 
posterity, 459. 

Odes, by Cumberland, to the Sun, extract from, 312. To Dr. James, 
313. 

O'Rourke, three brothers of tbis name at Clonfert, 198. Characters of, 
199, 200. 

Othello, specimen of mock-criticism on, in the Observer, 437. Defective, 
440,441. 

P. 

Parr, Dr., Cumberland's pamphlet of Curtius rescued from the Gulph, 
directed against him, 471. 

Perreau, defence of, written by Cumberland, 342. 

Peterborough, Bishop of, See Cumberland, Bishop. 

■ See of, Dr. Richard Cumberland nominated to, 5. Mode- 

rately endowed, 6. 

Physicians in the country, may secure a respectable practice, 3. In the 
metropolis, confounded with a throng of aspirers, ib. 

Pinkerton, Mr. mock-criticism upon Dry den's Ode, 435. 

Plagiarism, curious, of Pope's in his Essay en Man, from a sermon of Dr. 
Bentley's, 24—26. 

Plain Reasons why we should believe in Christ, &c, a tract by Cumber- 
land, buffoonery in, 540, 541. Conclusion of, 541 — 545. 

Pocock, Dr., Bishop of Ossory, his character, 138. Visited by Cumber- 
land, ib. 



618 INDEX. 

Pope, in Ms Dun-clad, speaks contemptuously of Br. Bentley's skill in 
verbal criticism, 1 1 . Represents him obsequiously attended by Walker, 
vice-master of Trinity-College, 13. Curious plagiarism of, in his Essay 
on Man, from a sermon of Dr. Bentley's, 24 — 26. Opinion of Dr. Bentley 
on his translation of Homer, 38. Challenged by Dr. Bentley's son, 39. 
Declines the challenge, ib. 

Pownall, Mr., acting secretary to the Board of Trade, 93. Appointed to 
instruct Cumberland in the details of business, ib. A mere man of 
office, ib. 

Prince of Wales, father of his present Majesty, elegiac verses upon the 
death of ? by Cumberland, 63. 

R. 

Reading, the pleasures of, 395. 

Retaliation, a poem, extract from., 270. 

Retrospection, a poem by Cumberland, extracts from, 153, 154, 189, 190, 
272, 273, 278, 393, 394, 577, 578. Published a few days before his 
death, 576. Character of, 576, 577. 

Reynolds, Reverend Decimus, appoints Cumberland his heir, 224, 225. 
Letter-to, 227. 

Sir Joshua, Cumberland accused of attacking his character, 

398. Tribute to, 465. 

Richard Cceur de Lion, a poem by Sir James Bland Burges, written with 
more rapidity than Pope translated Homer, 583. 

Robinson, John, Cumberland's letter to, 374. 

Robinson, Doctor, translated from the see of Ferns, to that of Kildare, 140. 

Rodney, Sir George Brydges, character of, by Cumberland, 343 — 347. 

Rogers, Mr. becomes acquainted with Cumberland, at Mr. Dilly's, 472, 
Remarks on his Pleasures of Memory, ib. 473. Advice to him, on his 
poetical talents, 473. Cumberland's posthumous papers, bequeathed to 
him, Sir James Bland Burges, and Mr. Sharpe, 598. 

Romney, Mr., controversy between Cumberland, and Mr. Hayley, respect- 
ing his life, 462. Tribute to, 465. 

Rousseau's attempt to record all the events of his life, 28. Doubtful whe- 
ther he unfolded all, ib. Gray's opinion of his Nouvelle Heloise, 90. 

S. 

Saclimlle, Lord, visibly declines in health, 484. The old friend and patron 
of Cumberland, ib. Character and peculiarities of, 484 — 488. Cumber- 
land's account of his last moments, 489. His solemn declaration 
respecting the affair of Minden, ib. 

Sailor's Daughter, a play by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 



INDEX, 619 

S'ancJioniatho's Phenician History, much time spent in examining-, by 
Bishop Cumberland, 7. Earliest accounts of idolatry in, 8. Refused 
to be published by Bishop Cumberland's bookseller, 8. Published aftee 
his death by his son-in-law, 9. 

Schiller, extract from, on the brevity of histrionic fame, 55. 

School-connexions, remarks on, 51, 52. 

Scott, Mr. Walter, portrait of, by Miss Seward, 184. Observations on his 
poetry, 2/3—279. On the Lady of the Lake, 276. On Don Roderick, 
277. Cumberland's temperate but discriminate censure of, 278. 

Sedgwicke, Mr., appointed under-secretary to Lord Halifax, 146. The 
situation wmch he vacates, accepted by Cumberland, 147. 

Select British Drama, edited by Cumberland, 568. His History of the 
Rise and Progress of the Stage in, ib. 

Seneca, a passage in the Troades of, versified by Cumberland, 98 — 100. 

Seward, Miss, opinion of Cumberland's Memoirs, 181, 186, 187. Censure 
of her letters, 181 — 184. Instances of her vanity, affectation, and 
vitiated phraseology, ib. Her hyperbolical adulation of Mr. Southev, 
1 83 . Her portrait of Mr. Walter Scott, L84. 

Shaltspeare in the Shades, a dramatic piece by Cumberland, 44. De- 
scription of, and extracts from, 44 — 50. 

Shahspeare' s Timon of Athens, altered and spoiled by Cumberland, 313. 
Specimen of, 314. Murphy's and Davies' opinion of, 316. 

Sharpe, Mr., tribute of affection to, by Cumberland, 473. Public in- 
debted to, for the suggestion of his Memoirs, ib. Lines addressed to, 
474, 475. Accedes to Cumberland's request, 475. Cumberland's 
posthumous papers bequeathed to him, Sir James Bland Burgcs > and 
Mr. Rogers, 598. 

Sherlock, Bishop, visited by Cumberland, 109. In the last stage of 
bodily decay, ib. His mind unaffected, ib. Arranges his sermons for 
publication, while in this state, ib. 

Siddons, Mrs., Cumberland's Carmelite, dedicated to her, 465. Speaks 
the prologue, 470. 

Smith, Dr., Master of Trinity College, agrees upon an alteration of the 
existing statutes in favour of Cumberland, 90. 

Smith, Mr., his remonstrance with Cumberland, 161. 

Society for the suppression of Vice, some advice to, and remarks on, 
450,451. 

Southey Mr., Miss Seward's adulation of, 183. His Madoc, neglected by 
the present generation, ib. 

Spain, brief history of painting in, 402. 

Spanheim, Baron, a friend of Dr. Bentley, 20. 

Spanish Painters, anecdotes of, published by Cumberland, 397. 



t>20 INDEX. 

Spenser, opinion of, by Lord Burleigh, 89. 

Stage, history of the rise and progress of, by Cumberland, 568. 

Stamvick, rectory of, accepted by Cumberland's father, 34. Exchanged 

by him for the vicarage of Fuiham, 109. 
St. Mark's Eve, elegy on, written by Cumberland, 96. Published by 

Dodsley, ib. Passes into oblivion, ib. 
-Stone, Primate, his character, 139, 140. 
Stoneland, a seat of Lord George Germain, 337, 338. 
Stothard, Mr., exertions in his behalf by Cumberland, 577. 
Stubbs, Mr. tribute to, 465. 
Style, observations on simplicity of, 253, 254. General remarks on, 444 

—446. 
Summei^s Tale, a drama by Cumberland, remarks on, 156, 157. 
-Sun, extract from Cumberland's ode Xo the, 312. 

T. 

Terence, observations on his Andria, 283. 

Thompson, Dr., a physician out of practice, Dodington's body-physician, 

description of, 111. Anecdote of, 111, 112. An inmate of La Trappe, ib. 
Tichell, remarks upon his elegy on the death of Addison, 86, 87. 
Timon of Athens, Shakspeare's play of, altered and spoiled by Cumberland, 

313. Specimen of, 314— t316. Murphy's and Davies' opinion of, 316. 
Tiranna, a celebrated Spanish actress, account of, 362—367. 
Townspnd, Charles, one of the Lords of Trade, notices Cumberland fop 

solving an enigma, which required a geometrical process, 97. Submits 

a report to him, for his inspection, ib. Affords him an opportunity of 

displaying his scholastic acquirements, 97 : , 98. 
Townsend, Mr., absurd examination of his Armageddon, by Cumberland, 

574, 575. 
Trinity College, Cambridge, an alteration in its existing statutes, agreed 

upon, in favour of Cumberland, 90. 
Troades, of Seneca, a passage in, versified by Cumberland, 98 — 100. 
Tunbridge, invocation to, from the Retrospection, 393. Volunteers of, 

headed by Cumberland, 581. 
'Turner, Mr. Sharon, sends a complimentary letter to Cumberland, 584, 

585. 

V. 

Vicar of Wakefield, copyright of, sold for sixty guineas, 269. Cumberland's 

mistake concerning, ib. 
fincent, Dr., Dean of Westminster, his address delivered on the funeral 

of Cumberland, 589. Objections to, 590. 



INDEX. 621 

fiirgifs Georgics, part of, translated by Cumberland, 5*6, 57. Extract 
from, 58. 

W. 

Walker, vice-master of Trinity College, represented as the obsequious 
attendant of Dr. Bentley, 13. 

Wallis, Dr., a friend of Dr. Bentley, 20. 

Walloons, remarks on Cumberland's comedy of, 406. Henderson's cha- 
racter in, ib. 407. 

Warburton, Bishop, Dr. Bentley's opinion of, 38. Complimentary letter 
to Mr. Cumberland, on the Banishment of Cicero, 125, 126. Opinion 
of Burke's style, 252. 

Warren Dr., a competitor of Cumberland, while at school, 39. 

Wat Tyler, a comic opera, by Cumberland, altered and produced under 
the name of the Armourer, 547. 

West, Mr., tribute to, 465. 

West Indian, presented to Garrick, 202. Accepted and performed, 203, 204. 
History of its success, 204—206. Copyright sold to Griffin for 150?. who 
boasted of having sold 12,000 copies, 205, 206. Criticisms upon it, by 
Lord Lyttleton and Lord Clare, 207. By Lord;Nugent, 208. Observa- 
tions upon its fable, characters, and language, 208—215- Belcour, 
209, 210. Charlotte Rusport, Louisa Dudley, 210. Major O'Flaherty, 
210—213. Inferior to the delineations of Irish characters, by Colman 
and Miss Edgeworth, 213. Ungrammatical construction of the lan- 
guage, 214. Mrs. Inchhald's mode of criticism, 214, 215. 

Westminster, Dean of, address delivered on the funeral of Cumberland, 
589. Objection to, 590. 

Westminster Abbey, Cumberland buried in Poet's Corner there, 589. 

Westminster School, Cumberland removed to, 50. His contemporaries 
there, 50, 51. 

Wheel of Fortune, a play, by Cumberland, notice of, 547. Kemble's 
acting in Penruddock contributes to its popularity, 553. Outline of the 
plot taken from Kotzebue's Misanthropy and Repentance, 553. Its 
characters examined, 553 — 557. Mrs. Inchbald's observation on, 554. 

Whig, constitutional, character of, 79. 

Widow of Delphi ; or, the Descent of the Deities, remarks on Cumberland's 
opera of, 341. 

Word for Nature, a play, by Cumberland, notice of, 547. 



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